Word: treatment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their patients. Critics argue that many patients go into analysis after a traumatic experience, such as divorce or a loved one's death, and are bound to do better anyway when the shock wears off. One study shows improvement for people merely on a waiting list for psychoanalytic treatment; presumably the simple decision to seek treatment is helpful...
From its inception, psychoanalysis has been plagued by an elitist image. Most patients are middle and upper class, and even today only 2% are nonwhite. Analysts say that the treatment works best for the YAVIS (Young, Adaptable, Verbal, Intelligent and Successful). It also helps to be W (Wealthy). A psychoanalytic hour (actually it is now usually 45 to 50 minutes) costs from $20 to $100, with the average at $50, or $12,000 a year for the five-times-a-week treatment recommended by Freud. As a concession to economic reality, most American psychoanalysts see patients only once or twice...
While the scheme had successful aspects, it also brought new problems. Says Robert Michels: "Thirty years ago, 75% of all psychiatric treatment was conducted in hospitals. Today, 75% takes place in an outpatient setting. That's progress." Still psychiatric patients fill 40% of all hospital beds in the nation, and the number of mental patients in nursing homes, prisons and single-room occupancy residences is up. Says Payne Whitney's John Talbott: "We've merely shifted the mentally ill population, not decreased...
...community mental-health centers have their own headaches. Funding is short, and the goal of low-cost care is proving illusory. According to various estimates, each patient visit costs between $35 and $40, more than in private practice, for treatment that is generally of lower quality. Says Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard: "Taking care of people well cannot be done in a less expensive way than just warehousing them, which was what we were doing before...
Though the fare is heavy and perceptive compared with conventional comics, the cartoon paneling cannot, of course, do justice to the complexity of Marxist thought. Del Rio's treatment of the theory of surplus value is little more than a shouting match between a cartoon worker who wants more wages and a Daddy Warbucks entrepreneur who seeks investment return. Worse, del Rio occasionally slips into heated leftist polemic and embarrassing overpraise of his hero. At one point, he credits Marx singlehanded with now making possible "what was impossible for 20 centuries: freedom from the exploitation...