Mental illness often starts early in life and ends late, leaving shattered families in its wake. It is more frightening, more mysterious and more costly than almost any other disease.
Or it used to be.
That dark picture is brightening very rapidly now, thanks largely to the development of new drugs that help check, if not cure, the worst of the major mental illnesses. They are schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder (manic depressive psychosis), major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety attack disorder and panic disorder.
Back in 1960, when the population of America’s mental institutions totaled 630,000, most people with these afflictions were doomed to pass their lives in grim incarceration. Now, with new treatments and medications, up to 80 percent of patients with the worst cases of those six mental illnesses can and do live normal or nearly normal lives.
There is a generation of medical practitioners who have spent 20 years or more of their lives hoping, looking and tracking a big jump. The next giant step in conquering anxiety, panic and other mental illnesses is in the immediate future.
In 1964, Dr. Benjamin Pasamanick, a medical researcher, boldly forecast that one day 80 percent of serious cases of mental disease could be treated at home with drug therapy. Few believed him. When he died recently, his prediction had almost come true for those with the major mental diseases schizophrenia.
