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Part: 12 Session: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536 Page 152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181 of 1143
This was before the use of drugs in mental illness.
Yes, yes.
Now, as time went on the funds did not increase in a very snappy way, but by fiscal '52 or '53, there was only 10,959,000 for the Mental Health Institutes, for training and research, and the training needs were simply gigantic as every mental health institution in the nation was short of trained people, short of psychiatrists. It was a very hard row to hoe.
Mr. Len Adams was finally retired and we got Mike Gorman, who had written a very dramatic book on mental illness as he had seen it in the state hospitals of Oklahoma--he'd been a reporter on one of the Oklahoma City papers and he was very fired up about the problem and was a very eloquent speaker.
Mrs. Mahoney was one of the early Council members, not the first but around in the early '50s she was on the Mental Health Council and she and Ben May and Charlie Schlaifer and I often urged to be for more medical research into the causes of severe mental illnesses. Too often, the people who were on the Council, the professionals, were interested only in the psychiatric aspects of mental illness and didn't conceive of the idea that it could be based on any chemical disorganization within a person, even though they knew that people with pellagra, who had been considered mentally ill, had been cured by the use of nicotinic acid, and that people who had terrible illnesses as a result of syphilis were helped by penicillin. It still didn't seem to
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