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Between about 1850 and 1950 there was a steady increase in the number of patients staying in mental hospitals. In England and Wales, for example, there were just over 7,000 such patients in 1850, nearly 120,000 in 1930, and nearly 150,000 in 1954. Thereafter the number steadily declined, reaching just over 100,000 in 1970 and 75,000 in 1980, a decrease of almost 50 percent. The same process began in the United States in 1955 but continued at a more rapid rate. The decrease, from just under 560,000 in 1955 to just over 130,000 in 1980, was more than 75 percent. In both countries it became official policy to replace mental hospital treatment with community care, involving district general hospital psychiatric units in Britain and local mental health centers in the United States. This dramatic change can be partly attributed to the introduction of antipsychotic medications, which drastically changed the atmosphere of mental hospital wards. With the recovery of lucidity and calmness, many psychotic patients could return to their homes and live at least a partially normal existence. The wholesale release of mental patients into the community was not without problems, however, since many areas lacked the facilities to support and maintain such patients, many of whom thus received inadequate care.
Development of behavior therapy
In the 1950s and ’60s a new type of therapy, called behavior therapy, was developed. In contrast to the existing psychotherapies, its techniques were based on theories of learning derived from research on classical conditioning by Ivan Pavlov and others and from the work of such American behaviorists as John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. Behavioral therapy arose when the theoretical principles that were originally developed from experiments with animals were applied to the treatment of patients.
In 1920 Watson experimentally induced a phobia of rats in a small boy, and in 1924 Mary Cover Jones reported the extinction of phobias in children by gradual desensitization. Modern behavior therapy began with the description by the South African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe of his technique of systematically desensitizing patients with phobias, beginning by exposing them to the least-feared object or situation and gradually progressing to the most-feared. Behavioral therapies were more quickly adopted in Europe than in the United States, where psychoanalytic precepts had exercised a particular dominance over psychiatry, but by the 1980s behavioral therapies were also well established in the United States.
Further developments in the mental health profession
The number of mental health professionals increased significantly after World War II. In the United States the number of psychiatrists was 3,000 in 1939 but had increased to more than 50,000 by the early 1990s. By 2013, however, this number had decreased to about 49,000, despite growing numbers of patients seeking psychiatric care. Nonmedical mental health professionals also increased substantially in number. Clinical psychologists, who at one time largely administered psychometric tests, also began providing psychotherapy and behavior therapy. Psychiatric social workers also became psychotherapists and played prominent roles in mental health centers. New roles emerged for nurses, including behavior therapy and the management of chronic mental illness in the community.
Psychotherapy retains a major role in the mental health profession. Subsequent to the development of psychoanalysis, the varieties of psychotherapy have increased and multiplied. The repertoire of medications used in the treatment of mental illness has continued to grow as new drugs are developed or new applications of existing ones are discovered. Research on the biochemical and genetic causes of mental disease has also continued to make headway. In the early 21st century the triad of psychotherapy, medication, and counseling afforded an unprecedented array of approaches, techniques, and procedures for alleviating the symptoms of people with mental disorders.