Word: mental
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...working six hours a day in jobs such as laboratory assistant or clerical worker. Just as important, unrewarded behavior-including tantrums and imaginary conversations with spirits -declined drastically. As they saved up tokens for such expensive items as trips to town, most patients began to exercise the "normal" mental processes of choice and thinking ahead...
Comparable rescue rates have been recorded in most of the 50-odd other U.S. institutions that are now using reinforcement technique. In the not too distant future, Azrin believes, "virtually all state mental-hospital patients can be discharged into sheltered halfway-house care." Reinforcement therapy has also been used with apparent success to treat alcoholics, autistic children and even unhappily married couples. Leonard Krasner, a pioneering reinforcement therapist at the State University of New York's Stony Brook campus, predicts that "within ten or fifteen years, many of the present techniques of psychotherapy will generally be acknowledged...
Firmly Established. Most mental-health experts still need to be convinced. For one thing, the exhaustive follow-up studies required to assess the possible limitations of behavioral therapy are just beginning. Psychiatrists wonder how thorough and long-lasting any behavioral treatment-reinforcement or otherwise-can be. To them, "sick" or unusual behavior is a sign of underlying psychosis; no matter how many external symptoms are extinguished, they fear that the deeper problem will keep rising to the surface. Reinforcement experts answer that they have yet to see such "symptom substitution" in their patients...
Still, the practical results are hard to dismiss, and the behavioristic approach has become a sustained, potent challenge to the dominance of Freudian-influenced psychiatry. Azrin contends that "the promise that these techniques have shown in the mental hospital justifies their being tried out in every other area." In his more whimsical moments, Azrin likes to think that behavior therapy will eventually follow the paradigm of progress once proposed by Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the first successful electric automobile self-starter. "First they tell you you're wrong, and they can prove it," said Kettering. "Then they tell...
...exclusion of such qualities as tenderness, patience, courage, humor or honesty. If sex is universally regarded as the ultimate status symbol, as Playboy and the pornocrats suggest, many responsible adults will wind up feeling cheated, and alienated; at the same time, and ironically, the aim of sex will become mental rather than sensory...