Mental Illness And The Economy

By correlating extensive economic and institutional data from New York State for the period from 1841 to 1967, Harvey Brenner concludes that instabilities in the national economy are the single most important source of fluctuations in mental-hospital admissions or admission rates. This relation is shown to have been relatively stable from pre-Civil War times to the present, and has not been visibly affected either by changes in psychiatric theory and practice of by any other major social change occurring in society as a whole during that time span.