Types And Classifications Of Mental Illness

With the introduction of new drugs and treatments, the outlook for patients in mental hospitals is steadily improving. In the best mental hospitals the improvement and recov­ery rate runs as high as 85'/i More and more patients can now be successfully treated on an out-patient basis in mental hospitals, in psychiatric wards or departments of general hospitals, in mental hygiene clinics, and in physicians' offices.

The present situation with mental hospitals is that the number of admissions, first and repeated, is continuing to rise. Rising also, however, are the number of discharges. The average length of stay and the total popula­tion of the hospitals are therefore both de­clining. As we empty mental hospital beds of young psychotics. however, these beds are immediately filled up by the aged. The geriat­ric problem is the big one. (Geriatrics means care of the aged.)

Who Treats Mental Illness?

Who treats mental illness? There is such a shortage of adequately trained physicians and psychiatrists and such a host of troubled peo­ple in the world that the treatment of mental illness has perforce fallen into many hands, some well qualified, many not. Lee R. Steiner, who has studied for many years the question of where people take their troubles, points out that they take them not only to psychiatrists and physicians but also to clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, ministers, rabbis, priests, marriage counselors, vocational counselors, guidance counselors, bartenders, beauticians, fortune tellers, astrologers, and a miscellaneous as­sortment of self-appointed experts and char­latans. Steiner's most trenchant observation is that the outcome of treatment appears to depend more on the rapport, or personal rela­tionship, established between the patient and his "healer" (therapist) than on any other factor.

The psychiatrist, of course, is the best-qualified person to treat the whole range of mental illness and certainly the psychoses. All psychiatrists are doctors of medicine (M.D.'s) who have taken postgraduate train­ing in their specialty. Most are certified as medical specialists by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. There are, how­ever, less than 20.000 psychiatrists in the whole United States. Not all psychoanalysts are M.D.'s.