THE RESEARCH BUDGET of a single Illinois hos- pital (I
see from Miles Howard's article this week) is larger than the total government expenditure here on mental health. If this is so, it is a staggering indictment not only of the Govern- ment, but of the Medical ReSearch Council and the medical profession. The reasons for the Council's neglect are set out in a new Fabian pamphlet Policy for Mental Health, by Kenneth Robinson, MP; psychiatry remains the despised poor relation of medicine; and in any case, it does not lend itself to the rigid scientific standards which the Council seeks to apply. It can be argued that the profession's suspicion of psy- chiatry is well founded; but if so, surely this is all the more reason for devoting far greater re- sources to research in the field in order to find out where past workers, Freudians, Pavlovians or pragmatists, have gone wrong? To say this cannot be achieved because of the-lack of trained researchers is nonsensical: there is bound to be such a shortage if we provide less money in the whole of Britain than a single research estab- lishment gets in Illinois.
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