Perhaps we need a round table.

Introduction:  Perhaps we need a round table.

Psychotherapy: the purchase of friendship (1986)  By William Schofield

p.4 1.  The Countable Thousands

   Over one half of all the hospital beds in this country are occupied by mental patients.  There are 600,000 psychiatric patients housed in public and private mental hospitals at any given time.  There are approximately 125, 000 new admissions annually to public institutions for custodial care of psychiatrically ill persons.  Of the total number of patients admitted to state hospitals each year, nearly one third are patients who are entering such hospitals for at least the second time.

…These facts do not and cannot convey in themselves, to even the most sensitive and imaginative of persons, the true dimensions of hurt and loss experienced by these thousands upon thousands of psychological invalids.  Statistics which are intended to bring precision to descriptive communication fail utterly when the essential subject is suffering.  Human misery does not yield to quantification.

…Really to know such suffering at all, short of experiencing it ourselves, we must see it directly.  We must visit a mental hospital; we must see the faces of patient after patient; we must observe the daily routine…

….people may become ill and present problems…when in unbearable conflict with unacceptable and often unconscious aspects of themselves and their relationships or struggling with the effects of harmful early experiences.  …the setting for (the process of healing) is…relationship…must involve trust and confidentiality…true love and acceptance…

.................

[And the 'invisible wars' continue, unabated.]