The Cost Of Mental Care

“A Society that can afford atomic bombs can afford some good psychiatry,” say the authors in their conclusions to this book, after documenting in impressive detail that at present American society provides scandalously poor psychiatric care to the majority of lower-class patients.

This collaborative work by a sociologist and a psychiatrist is of great import for students of mental illness as well as for students of society. Highly competent in its scientific method, it is both brilliant and courageous in the analysis of data. The authors report on the relation between mental illness and class position on the basis of a large-scale research on the social structure of a community, the psychiatric patients of this commun...