The concept of mental illness as a disease process has resulted in the focusing of psychiatric attention on the symptoms which a "mentally ill" patient manifests. The extent to which a mentally ill person improves is traditionally based on the extent to which the original symptom picture becomes modified. As with most disease entities, the patient is judged as having recovered when the symptoms of the disease abate.Descriptive psychiatry, as practiced in most mental hospitals today, is based on the diagnostic classifications outlined by Kraepelin. His observation that the praecox progressed to a demented end-state led him to believe that this process was based on some degenerative "disease" process. Later evidence discredits the idea of the necessary demented end product, and, to a lesser extent, that this disease occurs only in young adults. The original evidence, then, for regarding dementia praecox as a disease process is no longer consistent with observations following those of Kraepelin. The hypothesis may still be true, but the evidence upon which the hypothesis was based is no longer accepted.The agreement of the American Psychiatric Association on a classification system in 1934 was a major step forward. Professional personnel had at last come to agree on a common system which facilitated communication and research. It is unfortunate, however, that many psychiatrists still regard the classifications as synonymous to disease entities, although the majority of the psychiatric group 1 In cooperation with Psychiatric and Nursing Services, particularly Anna Kontas, who supervised the collection of all admission behavioral data. This study was supported by the Psychiatric Evaluation Project, Richard L. Jenkins, Director.
From the results of many well controlled investigations of the effects of ataractic drugs on psychiatrically hospitalized patients, there can be little doubt but that many of these drugs act as a stimulus in modifying the psychotic's behavior and symptomatology. As Staudt and Zubin (19S7) point out, however, the important question is not so much whether the therapeutic agent stimulates an immediate change, but whether the agent has any significant effect on longitudinal recovery rates. The use of control and experimental groups in an adequate double blind design, in which the experimental (drug) group was found to have improved significantly in comparison with the control group, does not begin to answer the important question raised by Staudt and Zubin. In such studies, the use of the control group allows the researcher to reach conclusions regarding only the immediate stimulus effect of the drug under investigation.Perhaps the best way to evaluate the overall contribution of these drugs would be to compare the release rates, length of hospitalization, and return rates of two identical hospitals; one committed to a therapeutic involvement with the psychotic patient without drugs, the other relying on drugs as the major treatment method. Another possibility would be to compare the same hospitals' discharge and return rates before and after the introduction and extensive use of drugs as a
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.