A woman patient was admitted to a state hospital at the age of fifty-five suffering from severe paranoid delusions. For some seventeen years her condition remained unchanged and she was adjudged incurably insane by a board of psychiatrists in 1941.

Mott began treating this now seventy-two-year-old woman psychotherapeutically, and in the space of a few months she recovered sufficiently to leave the state hospital and hold down an excellent job. The author states that we must re-evaluate our concepts of the deterioration and irreversibility in the chronic psychoses, since this case demonstrates that our pessimistic attitude may be the cause and not the result of many 'incurable' cases.