Word: treatment
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Talk? For the couch treatment, patients must not only be supine but intelligent (with I.Q.s, many believe, of 115-120, about college level). Psychoanalysis works best on neuroses (most often of the upper income brackets); it is no good for most psychoses. Besides the protracted, cumbersome and expensive method of the couch, what specific treatments do psychiatrists use? The one that occupies most psychiatrists' time is face-to-face talks about the patients' here-&-now problems...
...what the intent.) The modern version is applied with more humanity, no more understanding of what makes it work. But patients who are so sick that they cannot talk at all may be able to talk after shock. Psychiatrists try to use such brief lucid periods to start helpful treatment...
...some such "truth serum" as sodium amytal). In a twilight state between wakefulness and deep sleep, the patient often says things he cannot or will not say when fully conscious. Narcosynthesis works best when the patient's difficulties are recent (as in some "war neuroses"). The most desperate treatment of all, for the patient who fails to respond to anything else, is a drastic brain operation, like lobotomy (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946). Lobotomy may relieve the more troublesome symptoms, but it may also leave the patient so irresponsible or lumpish that he "seems to have lost his soul...
Psychotherapy (the treatment of mental illness) includes other surprising-and less unpleasant-methods. At the Menninger clinic, for instance, doctors might prescribe, for a depressed patient, "two weeks of unsolicited love." This means that the patient's doctor and nurses should treat him with the full measure of brotherly love that he needs but does not know how to ask for. Psychiatrists also use music as a soother, and such "occupational therapy" as publishing newspapers, carpentry and jewelry-making...
During the war, men in the U.S. Army got better psychiatric care than any large group of people ever had before. If they needed a psychiatrist, they were, for the most part, able to get one quickly, easily -and free. The peacetime picture is very different. The cost of treatment can be staggering. A psychoanalysis usually costs at least $10 an hour, possibly $25 or even $50. At five times a week for 100 weeks (an analysis can easily go on that long), the total cost may run to $5,000 or more. At the Menninger Foundation, the minimum charge...