OCR Text |
Show Tranquilizers Cut Mental Illness A revolution has taken place in our mental institutions, according to the Health News Institute. A revolution which, for the first time, holds forth hope that instead of building new mental institutions, and searching desperately for personnel to staff them, we may be on the road to reducing our mental health problem. This is not a bloody political revolution. It is a massive change based on a small tablet, a liquid or a hypodermic syringe. It is the revolution of the tranquilizer drugs. Since the introduction of the tranquilizers, early in the 1950's, the population in the nation's state and federal mental institutions has decreased steadily. According to a report in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Henry Brill and Robert E. Patton of the Departmentof Mental Hygiene of the state of New York, there is a direct correlation between the introduction of tranquilizing drug therapy in the 1950s and the steady decline in the number of mental patients in New York state hospitals. The drop, they say, "was coincidental with the introduction intro-duction of the tranquilizing drugs." The fall in the population of mental hospitals in New York has continued for four consecutive years. In the four year period, the total reduction has been 4,100 cases. But tranquilizing drugs have had a vital effect, even on those patients forced to remain hospitalized. This is evident in the reduction in the need for restraints and seclusion, and the liberalizing of hospital policy. The Health News Institute points out that the decline in mental hospital population is not restricted to New. York Mate. In the three-year period, 1955, 1956 and 1957, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare reports that population in mental hospitals throughout the nation declined by more than 10,000 patients, despite an increase in admission rates. And, during 1959, HEW states, mental hospital population declined by an additional 2,142. The revolution in mental hospitals, sparked by the advent of the tranquilizing drugs, does not lie solely in the realm of statistics. For statistics do not tell the story of the thousands of patients who are helped out of the halls of uselessness and into the world of self-sufficiency; of the new hopes of those families who had been forced to commit a wife, husband or child to a mental institution, or the emotions of those who found that a loved one would be able to return to a normal, useful life. |