Word: low
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...coal companies are faring well in spite of the industry's travail. In the West, strip-mine operations have benefited from low labor costs and long-term contracts at profitable rates. But other companies have wound up merely digging up the coal and dumping it on the ground. Utility companies have stockpiled so much that many now have no more room to store the fuel. Meanwhile, the surplus is forcing down contract prices for single shipments, which have tumbled from about $31 a ton a year ago to as little...
...their patients. Public misconceptions about psychiatry are still worse, including the cartoonist's idea that almost all psychiatry, rather than just traditional analysis, is done on a couch. For years psychiatrists have also been regarded as medicine's robber barons. In fact, as medical specialists go, they rank relatively low on the pay scale (average annual income: $47,565), far behind surgeons, $73,245, and only slightly above...
...little more than store patients, those who responded to the new antipsychotic medication could be released to their families and treated as outpatients. Under the Community Mental Health Center Act of 1963, 647 local centers have been set up to treat such "deinstitutionalized" patients, and also to bring low-cost care to the rest of the public, particularly the poor...
...community mental-health centers have their own headaches. Funding is short, and the goal of low-cost care is proving illusory. According to various estimates, each patient visit costs between $35 and $40, more than in private practice, for treatment that is generally of lower quality. Says Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard: "Taking care of people well cannot be done in a less expensive way than just warehousing them, which was what we were doing before...
...intricacies of this system are just beginning to be unraveled. Scientists speculate that when the body produces too few or too many such chemicals, behavioral problems ensue. Severe depression, for instance, could be linked to abnormally low levels of a family of neurotransmitters called monoamines (serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine), which can be destroyed by an enzyme called monoamine oxidase (MAO). To keep the enzyme from doing its work, chemists have developed drugs called MAO inhibitors. Other antidepressants, the tricyclics, increase the life of monoamines in the synapse...