Word: mentalize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fall and winter practice, each oarsman is sustained only by the distant image of racing season. As a result, those long hours of pre-season rowing--in a racing shell, in an indoor rowing tank, on an "unpleasant machine" called the ergometer--develops in each oarsman a formidable mental drive that will be focussed, months later, into a six-minute race...
Much of this new psychiatry centers on schizophrenia, the most disabling and puzzling of mental illnesses. There are dozens of contending theories to explain it. The leading behavioral one derives from Anthropologist Gregory Bateson's concept of the double bind, which holds that schizophrenia arises from a prolonged dose of conflicting instructions, as, say, when a mother tells a child not to eat sweets, yet is constantly rewarding it with candy. But studies of identical twins and adopted children by Biochemist Seymour Kety strongly suggest a genetic base for schizophrenia. According to Kety, the flaw, contained in the cells...
Although drugs have been used for decades to fight mental illness, scientists have not really understood how they worked. Now all that is changing. A miraculous pharmacopoeia is being explored to deal with every kind of ailment in the mind and body. Not too far off may be tailor-made drugs that will lull insomniacs into peaceful sleep, dull the throbbing of pain, organize a schizophrenic's thoughts and perhaps even simulate the pleasures...
...complex vitamins, doctors thought that it was a form of psychosis. But proof that body and psyche are really part and parcel of the same physiological system did not come until the discovery of the first tranquilizers in the early 1950s. It was drugs like Thorazine that rapidly emptied mental hospitals, reducing a population of 560,000 to fewer than 200,000 in barely a generation...
Some neuroscientists even foresee the day when these new biochemical tools may be used analytically. Thus it would become possible to diagnose mental illness from a simple blood, urine or spinal fluid sample. Once imbalances in body chemistry are determined, doctors would be able to adjust them by administering the appropriate drugs. Harvard's Dr. Seymour Kety insists that such tactics are far from mind control: "You can't manipulate an individual's behavior in the way the popular mind would like to think." But Northwestern's Routtenberg is not so sure. Says he: "These techniques...