Word: psychiatrists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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, a psychiatrist and biochemist at the Mailman Research Center, warns that chemical cures can easily be oversold, like psychoanalysis and community psychiatry. Says he: "We are not going to find the causes and cures of mental illness in the foreseeable future...
...Psychiatrists themselves acknowledge that their profession often smacks of modern alchemy?full of jargon, obfuscation and mystification, but precious little real knowledge. The Patty Hearst trial was a typical embarrassment?one battery of distinguished psychiatrists neatly explained that Hearst was ill, another insisted that she was not. To radicals, feminists and homosexuals, psychiatry is just one more villainous agent of the status quo. More than a century ago, an antebellum psychiatrist blithely explained that slaves who tried to escape from their masters were suffering from "dromomania," the runaway disease. How does the public know that 20th century psychiatry...
...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...
Even mainline practitioners are uncertain that psychiatry can tell the insane from the sane. In one experiment, Stanford's D.L. Rosenhan planted eight sane volunteers, one of them a psychiatrist, in public and private psychiatric wards scattered across the country and told them to behave normally. Many inmates quickly realized that the eight impostors were sane because the would-be patients kept taking notes. But the staff psychiatrists never did. Says Rosenhan: "Any diagnostic process that lends itself so readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable...
...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 on an insane interpretation of psychiatry...