Word: patients
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...several thousand such emergency-treatment centers now operating throughout the U.S. Under a federal program launched in 1963, this census will expand even further. Their approach to mental illness seems to contradict much of prevailing psychiatric theory. Crisis intervention assumes, for instance, that the deeply disturbed patient can be snatched at the last minute from committable insanity-and that the last moment may be the best time to try. It argues that relief of the immediate symptoms of profound emotional stress is far more urgent than any investigation into their cause. In effect, it proposes to substitute emotional Band-Aids...
...Samaritanism. Just about anything goes, including drugs. "Sometimes you have to sock it to 'em," says Dr. Bruce Danto, director of the Detroit Psychiatric Institute's Suicide Prevention Center, a pioneer in a dramatic form of crisis intervention. "You don't have five years for the patient to come up with his own insights. You have to realize that you can't solve all the problems of the world. You just try to patch some...
...discovered that psychiatric first aid, administered on the spot to battle-shocked soldiers, often quickly restored them to duty. On the other hand, those sent home for protracted institutional treatment responded far more slowly to intensive care. It was almost as if institutionalization itself helped confirm the patient's suspicion that something was terribly wrong...
...many advocates of crisis intervention, the unfortunate effect of hospitalization is a basic article of faith. Their objective is to obstruct the patient's progress to an institution, and they can point to some conditional evidence of success. The annual commitment rate to state mental hospitals from San Francisco, for example, has dropped from 2,887 to 119 in the past four years-a decline in which the city's expanding complex of emergency-treatment centers was a major factor. Grady Memorial Hospital, which opened a crisis center in 1968, now treats 5,000 psychiatric emergencies a year...
Crisis intervention is not a panacea for mental illness. It does not benefit the patient whose emotional problems, however upsetting, are not overwhelming -the so-called normal neurotic who either applies for long-term therapy, if he can afford it, or else manages to live with his problems. Many therapists flatly reject it-and so do some patients. Says Detroit's Danto: "Often you have to talk your way in. They don't see you as the Ajax knight coming in to zap them clean...