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Psychiatry in the USA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

J. Pierre Loebel*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
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In a rash moment of bonhomie, having offered to one of the editors to write a personal view of psychiatry in the USA today, and with his encouragement to proceed, I find myself a long time later reflecting as to why the task seems to have been so daunting. Interpretations regarding my DSM-III-Axis II disorder apart, the numbers involved perhaps provide some of the reasons. There are 38,276 psychiatrists in this country, mostly paying dues ($300.00 per year) to the American Psychiatric Association, which has 76 district branches across the country, with between a few dozen and a few thousand members each; $428 billion spent on total personal health care in 1988, approximately two-thirds of which was covered by Federal Government programmes, of which $351 million went to the mental health sector; 150,000 patients treated for longer than one year in the long-term care psychiatric hospitals in this postdeinstitutionalisation era; and 6.5 million persons resident in nursing homes (at an estimated cost of $46 billion) of whom more than 50% are estimated to suffer from Alzheimer's disease. From such an array it is difficult to distill the essentials with much confidence as to their reliability or significance. What follows is therefore selective and impressionistic.

Type
Foreign report
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1989

References

Crammer, J. L. (1986) An English psychiatrist in Ontario. Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 10, 315316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Editorial (1988) American Psychoanalytical Association Newsletter, 23, 2.Google Scholar
Gold, M. S. (1987) The Good News about Depression. New York: Villard Books.Google Scholar
Merrill, T. S. (1988) APA considers results of fee study “tragic” for psychiatry. Clinical Psychiatry News, 11, 1.Google Scholar
Szmukler, G. (1987) Foreign report: Psychiatry in Australia. Bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 11, 258260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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