You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Eminent Harvard Medical School professor J. Alan Hobson and writer Jonathan Leonard have teamed up to write an eloquent wakeup call for psychiatry in the United States today. Hobson, who directs the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and Leonard launch a scathing evaluation of the failures of a field and a society to care for the approximately three out of every one hundred adults in this country who suffer from severe mental illness.
Using case vignettes, largely from Hobson's experience and public knowledge, they lay the foundation for their recommendations, first, by defining the problems. Their brief history of psychiatry holds no shortage of criticism for either the medicalization of care or what they term “humanist” approaches of psychoanalysis and other psychologies. “Today's psychiatry,” they write, “is about where communicable disease medicine was [in World War I]. Until recently we could do little to combat severe disorders of the mind. We had no idea what caused them; our asylums were little more than holding tanks; and Freudian progress was disappointing” (pp. 16-17).
Psychoanalysis offered hope to physicians charged with the huge numbers of severely ill patients housed in massive institutions, and, in the 1920s, the American medical community embraced Freud's discipline and claimed it exclusively. Young doctors sought psychiatric training and the opportunity for a personal analysis and time talking with psychotic patients. Analysts chaired departments in all the most prestigious medical schools.