Word: mental
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...breed of psychiatric researchers are also beginning to suspect the same thing about depression, the most common of mental complaints. Simple depression or temporary gloom, to be sure, may be a normal response to some unhappy experience in everyday life. But the enduring pathological kind of depression may well be entirely neurochemical. Says Wyeth Labs Psychopharmacologist Larry Stein: "The normal brain is damned adaptive. It may undergo a short-term depression when things are going bad, but it bounces back when things go well again." The serious depressive, on the other hand, he says, may be "suffering from the biology...
...those who fear that the new researchers are out to reduce all human emotions and problems to chemistry's atoms and molecules, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, chief of clinical psychobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, has a tranquilizing message: "There is a chemistry of the human brain, but it acts in response to the environment." Goodwin also points out gently that brain research has not yet produced any new treatments for mental disease. In fact, the only early result expected from the research is agreement of existing antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs to eliminate side effects. Ross Baldessarini...
...always, psychiatrists are their own severest critics. Thomas Szasz, long the most outspoken gadfly of his profession, insists that there is really no such thing as mental illness, only normal problems of living. E. Fuller Torrey, another antipsychiatry psychiatrist, is willing to concede that there are a few brain diseases, like schizophrenia, but says they can be treated with only a handful of drugs that could be administered by general practitioners or internists. He writes: "The psychiatrist has become expendable; he is left standing between the people who have problems in living and those who have brain disease, holding...
...especially analysis, is now suffering a bad case of mid-life blues. Whatever else the Freudian movement accomplished, it raised hopes dramatically, set the stage for the narcissistic excesses of today's Me Decade, and propagated the notion that mind science was on the brink of blowing away all mental ills. "Psychiatry was overtouted," says Psychiatrist and Author Robert Coles. "Then there was the disenchantment, not only of patients, but also, of course, professionals " Adds Robert Michels, head of Cornell Medical Center's Payne Whitney Hospital and Clinic: "The public's enthusiasm for psychiatry 20 years ago was based...
...psychiatry is trying to change its slightly tarnished image, it is also changing its attitudes. One of its favorite projects of the 1960s was the community mental-health movement. That plan to bring psychiatric services to the deprived went hand in hand with a consensus among psychiatrists that state hospitals should be emptied of all but the most intractable and dangerous hard-core patients. The hospitals were jammed and poorly funded in most states. The idea was compelling: since psychiatric hospitals could presumably do little more than store patients, those who responded to the new antipsychotic medication could be released...