Word: treatments
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Psychiatry is as sharply split in its views on the causes and treatment of schizophrenia as schizophrenics are supposed to be split in their personalities. The prevailing view is still that of Freud: that schizophrenia is the full flowering of a maladjustment to other people that is seeded in childhood; to cure it, the victim must be helped to establish better relationships. At the opposite end of the psychiatric spectrum are those who hold that schizophrenia is a biochemical abnormality; if the abnormality could be identified, the victim might be cured by correcting the body's chemistry...
...invents in order to live in an unlivable position. He cannot make a move, or make no move, without being beset by contradictory pressures both internally, from himself, and externally, from those around him. He is in a position of checkmate." Before schizophrenia can be better understood and its treatment improved, psychiatry itself must undergo a deep change, Dr. Laing believes. He insists that a mental hospital is no place to treat a schizophrenic because there the psychiatrist has to play his role according to doctor-patient rules...
...hospitals if they weren't in the center, and others would be called psychiatrists outside. Visitors can't tell which is which. No one is being 'treated' in any accepted sense." In the centers, schizophrenics get an absolute minimum of tranquilizing drugs, and no shock treatment or brain surgery. The atmosphere is infinitely more permissive than in the most liberal mental hospital. Patients get up and go to bed when they please. They may do household work and cooking-or not, as they choose. They may spend whole days at solitaire or checkers, or just watching...
...bring on their illness, the psychiatrists meet with other family members to smooth the way. Fewer than one-fourth of the patients have to be readmitted. Though Dr. Laing hates being drawn into the numbers game, he asserts that these results are as good as those from intensive drug treatment, if not better. Too many drug-treated schizophrenics, he says, have to stay on drugs indefinitely, "in a biochemical Straitjacket," and their readmission rate is higher...
...chloroquine and pyrimethamine. These parasites even overcome the protective effect of a potent third antimalarial, dia-phenylsulfone (DOS), given to troops in the highlands. Falciparum's fever may be fatal if it attacks the brain. Last winter U.S. medics were saving nearly all their patients by intensive treatment with chloroquine and quinine, but 40% of the men suffered relapses...