Word: mental
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Social Anthropologist John Martin, practice "sequential marriages," taking one wife after another. Matches between first cousins are routine; mental retardation is common. Disease, poor diet and high infant mortality combine to give the Havasupai a life expectancy of only 44 years (U.S. average: 70). They also have a suicide rate 15% above the national average...
...avoid bathing or speaking to people and never to leave Illinois' Anna State Hospital. For 27 years, she had been considered an incurable schizophrenic. Today, Jane lives in a small town working as a companion to an elderly woman. She shows no sign of ever having been a mental patient...
Jane's rescue from the subhuman existence of a mental-hospital ward is one of several hundred dramatic improvements that have been achieved by a relatively new-and hotly debated -technique known as reinforcement therapy. Unlike psychiatric techniques which seek to deal with deep-seated causes of a patient's psychosis, reinforcement therapy concentrates on controlling and guiding everyday behavior. Its basic principle is that the residual signs of normality in an insane person should be encouraged by praise and applause-in effect, reinforced and taught with the help of tangible rewards...
...human and animal reflexes could be conditioned. His theories were expanded by the greatest living exponent of behaviorism, Harvard Psychologist B. F. Skinner, who demonstrated that rats, pigeons and even men are influenced by the consequences that their actions have. This principle, the reinforcement therapists insist, applies also to mental patients previously thought to be beyond psychiatric help...
Neatly Dressed. An even more challenging experiment in reinforcement therapy was begun eight years ago by Psychologists Teodoro Ayllon and Nathan Azrin at Anna State Hospital. In a ward of 46 chronic female schizophrenics and mental defectives, they exposed patients to the pleasures of cigarettes, television, a choice of roommates, social events and even walks around the hospital grounds. Then they announced that, henceforth, patients would have to "buy" everything except regular meals, a bed in the least desirable room and their prescribed medicines. They could earn metal "tokens" to make purchases simply by demonstrating normal behavior. Attendants then began...