My personal response to this depressing question would have to be an ashamed 'Yes' for the United States; a relieved 'No' for most of the rest of the developed world.
Admittedly, though, I am not the best person to provide a long view answer. We will soon be turning to Professor Edward Shorter, an eminent historian of psychiatry, to compare our current mistreatment of the severely ill with the practices of past epochs.
But I can speak from painful experience about the slippery downward slope of the past 50 years. When I first began work as a medical student on a psychiatric ward, we were very very optimistic that three new advances would dramatically improve the lives of our patients: 1) the availability of effective medication; 2) the availability of powerful research tools; and 3) the hope that state hospitals would disappear as patients were deinstitutionalized into the community.
[For more of this story, written by Allen Frances, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/is-this-the-worst-time-ev_b_5654808.html]
Comments (0)