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it might dark an historic moment in the history of the attack on mental illness in the United States. Now, curiously enough, this moment coincided with the beginning of the knowledge that there were drugs that you could do something with. There would have been no such conference had we not had a committee which had sufficient money and interested staff to see that the resolutions leading to the report of the Southern Governors Conference, the National Governors Conference on Mental Illness took place. Consequently, for a relatively small amount of money, I am hoping that large state funds will be voted in the next two years for training and research out of all proportion to what we could expect to raise on a voluntary basis.

Well, Mrs. Lasker, considering the nature of the governors conference and what I believe to be its original purpose, there was no machinery for functioning in the interim. I mean, it had to be handled by an independent committee of this sort interested in the subject.

Yes, there were no people sufficiently interested just in mental illness. There was nobody else operating. The National Association didn't want to be bothered with governments and yet the state governments were the ones who had the acutely ill patients. The Mental Health Association was really only talking about people who were mildly disturbed and needed to go to outpatient clinics; they never really attacked the problem