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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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to have a sufficiently simple of administration and it seemed complicated in its use. And by this time, I realized that you couldn't get much done for many people if the medicine you had for them involved too complicated a treatment: it's very expensive to have nurses watching patients all the time; if they go into deep comas they may die. It was a complicated and difficult method and it wasn't universally successful either.

Electroshock therapy never seemed to me an ideal solution but it was used in state mental hospitals before the new drugs and it's still used now, although relatively rarely.

After a year or so we found that the Mental Health Institute was not interested at all in the development of new drugs and this astonished us very much because we couldn't understand, when this big lead had been developed and when in New York State the increases in discharges was dramatic--actually in '52 there was an overcrowding of 25 percent in New York State--why the Mental Health Institute didn't take energetic steps to see what other drugs might be useful and to follow this lead.

Q:

Why that blind spot?

Lasker:

Well, we don't understand it to this day; however, Mr. Gorman and I thought it would be a good idea to establish a psychopharmacology testing center, where the Institute would be sent drugs from various pharmaceutical houses and where they would give suitable drugs to different state hospitals or any hospitals that wanted them for the testing of drugs on patients.





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