Word: patient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Patient's name: Psychiatry...
Complaint: Speaks of overwork, loss of confidence and inability to get provable results. Hears conflicting inner voices and insists that former friends are laughing behind his back. Patient agrees with Norman Mailer: "It's hard to get to the top in America, but it's even harder to stay there...
Diagnosis: Standard conflictual anxiety and maturational variations, complicated by acute depression. Identity crisis accompanied by compensatory delusions of grandeur and a declining ability to cope. Patient averse to the therapeutic alliance and shows incipient overreliance on drugs...
...suits that plague the rest of medicine. Many psychiatrists want to abandon treatment of ordinary, everyday neurotics ("the worried well") to psychologists and the amateur Pop therapists. After all, does it take a hard-won M.D. degree (a prerequisite psychologists do not need) to chat sympathetically and tell a patient you're-much-too-hard-on-yourself? And if psychiatry is a medical treatment, why can its practitioners not provide measurable scientific results like those obtained by other doctors...
...modified by other discoveries, some of them biological and chemical. Psychoanalysis, he said, could do little for the seriously ill, such as schizophrenics and other psychotics, and even many neurotics should expect little more than transforming "hysterical misery into common unhappiness." Even that might not be achieved if the patient was too old and set in his ways...