Letters

Drive the snakes from the snake pit!

Editor: The report by Deborah L. Gertz on the messed up mental health system (August-September, page 29) says that underlying everything is the problem of money, but it's not necessarily so. As in all branches of medical science, good treatment depends on good research, which, though severely underfunded in the mental health field, is never improved by any amount of funding, because the deficit, it seems, is not so much in the funding as in the research, which is based on the presumption that psychiatrists and psychotics are separate and distinct, as if the doctor were automatically immune to the disease — a fallacy which can cause serious problems for psychiatrists, as well as for their patients.

Mental research should be oriented toward finding mental patients who can be rehabilitated as psychiatrists, social workers or researchers. The great psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was an ex-neurotic who became an expert on neurotics, and treated them right, because he knew it could happen to him. Until ex-patients take over the mental health system, the patients will remain in the hospitals, the jails or the gutters because they will never get any good treatment from elite doctors who look down on them as inferiors.

Mary Jane Ward stated the problem over 40 years ago by writing The Snake Pit. If Gov. Thompson backed such a plan, it would cast him in the role of St. Patrick, driving the snakes from the snake pit, and it would not even require a tax increase.

Kenneth J. Epstein
Physicist
Chicago

Correction

There were errors in two tables accompanying Albert Somit's article, "Illinois' system of systems: time for a change in higher education, '' in our October issue. In table 1 on page 20, the state appropriations per full time equivalent (FTE) student and per FTE faculty member were switched between the Board of Governors and Board of Regents systems. Board of Governors' numbers should have been $5,200 per FTE student and $84,000 per FTE faculty. Corresponding figures for the Board of Regents should have been $4,680 and $84,700. And in table 3 on page 22 the amounts in the "External funds" column are far too small. Three zeros must be added to each figure, making them millions not thousands of dollars. The ranking is unchanged.
CG

November 198/Illinois Issues/9