Privatized mental Healthcare failing Dane County

Sigmund Freud wrote, over a century ago, of a problem we still refuse to accept and, as such, still suffer from. A colleague of Freud’s, who had been skeptical of and then later a proponent of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, wrote to Freud about the need for a “short, convenient, out-patient treatment.” At the time, Freud’s practice was to see patients for six days every week for a treatment that typically lasted for about a year. In response to his colleague’s wish, Freud emphasized that “psychoanalysis is always a matter of long periods of time.” 

In the time since Freud shared his work on the treatment of neurosis, successive efforts to reduce, standardize, hasten, and ultimately commodify the treatment of mental suffering have failed in their promises. Pharmacological inventions and “evidence-based” therapies that can be conducted in as few as six sessions have succeeded only in fanning the flames of our collective wish to be relieved of our suffering without making any contact with it. More recently in Dane County, another preoccupation of Freud’s has haunted us: If the human condition demands difficult and time-consuming care, who will provide it?

Read the full article, published with Tone Madison…