Word: klines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many victims of mental illness need never be sent to public hospitals, and many more could be helped toward a speedier, fuller recovery, if psychiatry took maximum advantage and made energetic use of drugs and knowledge already available. So said Dr. Nathan S. Kline last week at a meeting in Detroit of the American Public Health Association. The gains of the last five years are being largely ignored, he said...
...Kline, who is research director at New York's Rockland State Hospital and a pioneer in the use of drugs for severe mental illness, charged that public health officials have mostly refused to learn about the new drugs, and that some were actively blocking the use of new knowledge. The foot draggers, he said, included even psychiatrists and social workers who led the fight, decades ago, for more humane treatment of the mentally...
Saved a Billion. Dr. Kline was careful to insist that he does not say that drugs such as reserpine and chlorpromazine should be or can be the only treatment for mental ills or nervous disorders. But the opposition, he asserted, says that it has the only true gospel in psychotherapy, or talking-it-out methods. He quoted Dr. H. Angus Bowes: "To doubt the value of psychotherapy is regarded by many as slightly blasphemous, as though questioning the efficacy of prayer. But the physician who uses psychotherapy without medicine is as unhappy as his patients...
Since 1956, said Dr. Kline, there has been a drop of 23,000 in the population of state hospitals in 40 states, against a pre-drug estimate of a 60,000 increase over five years. This represents a current saving of $125 million a year on patients' upkeep; counting new building programs now being scrapped, he put the total saving at $1 billion so far. More important than money is the fact that increasing numbers of patients are leaving state hospitals, and have low relapse rates on continuing, outpatient drug treatment...
Unwilling and Unable. Yet most community mental-health clinics (usually city-or county-operated) will not accept patients who have ever been in a state hospital, Kline said. And many will not take a patient who is on drugs, because the medicine "would interfere with treatment." Moreover, many clinics have no personnel willing or even competent to prescribe or administer drugs...