Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...least one reason for such a move is an effort by psychiatry to retrieve its cloak of medical respectability at a time when the public is confusing it with charlatan therapies. Psychiatrists also are becoming more hard-nosed. They are increasingly convinced that their profession may not have the answers to profound political and social problems, and should perhaps restrict itself to getting measurable results with the truly sick. One current refrain: psychiatrists should become good team players, assisting other medical specialists in fulfilling their obligations to the sick. Many hospitals now have psychiatrists available for consultation on every kind...
...waistcoat again, psychiatry also hopes to shed what Asimus calls its "freaky" image. As he explains it, even doctors have traditionally regarded their psychiatric colleagues as "a strange breed of people" who picked the specialty to work out their own hang-ups as much as those of their patients. Public misconceptions about psychiatry are still worse, including the cartoonist's idea that almost all psychiatry, rather than just traditional analysis, is done on a couch. For years psychiatrists have also been regarded as medicine's robber barons. In fact, as medical specialists go, they rank relatively...
...responded to the new antipsychotic medication could be released to their families and treated as outpatients. Under the Community Mental Health Center Act of 1963, 647 local centers have been set up to treat such "deinstitutionalized" patients, and also to bring low-cost care to the rest of the public, particularly the poor...