Archive Report
Archive Report
Psychiatry: Growing Medical Specialty
Importance of Psychiatry in a Violent Society
A merican society, it has been asserted, is sick. This is an exaggerated notion—unless every society in which more than a few individuals are disturbed and violence is common is to be considered sick. Allusions to the troubled state of American society were heard frequently in 1968 following the assassination, by persons with obviously twisted minds, of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Before then and since then, the mindless stabbing or shooting of appalling numbers of far less prominent persons has served to reinforce doubts about the mental health of the American people. There are, indisputably, large numbers of mentally ill Americans, and the country is in urgent need of additional psychiatrists ...