Word: mental
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BEHAVIOR: Repressed-memory therapy is harming patients and intensifying a backlash against mental-health practitioners...
...continuing success of drugs in the treatment or alleviation of mental disorders ranging from depression to schizophrenia. Roughly 10 million Americans are taking such medications. To his credit, Freud foresaw this development. In 1938, a year before his death, he wrote, "The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances." Still, the recognition that some neuroses and psychoses respond favorably to drugs chips away at the domain originally claimed for psychoanalytic treatment...
...Clinton health-care reform proposals, oddly enough, which are prompting cost-benefit analyses across the whole spectrum of U.S. medicine, including treatments for mental illness. Whatever package finally winds its way through Congress, many experts concede that insurance will not be provided for Freud's talking cure. (A 50-min. hour of psychoanalysis costs an average of $125.) Says Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, director of the National Institute of Mental Health: "It's clear that classical psychoanalysis, which is four to five times a week for a four- to five-year duration, will not be covered...
...their part, U.S. psychoanalysts admit that Freud has been taking some pretty hard knocks lately but deny that his impact or importance has waned as a result. Says George H. Allison, a Seattle-based analyst: "I think Freud's influence in mental health as well as the humanities is much greater than it was 40 years ago. I hear much more being written and said about Freud." Allison points to the proliferation of therapies -- there are now more than 200 talking cures competing in the U.S. mental health marketplace, and 10 to 15 million Americans doing some kind of talking...
...half-finished novel called Accordion Crimes, she has already scouted Texas, Chicago and most of New England, with Minnesota and Wisconsin still ahead. This rumbling about the continent might simply be pencil sharpening, the kind of elaborate preparation that writers allow themselves while waiting for mental mists to clear. But for Proulx it works...