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Here is a splendid autobiography which is a delight to read. Sargant writes well and tells the remarkable story of his campaign with the help of two or three other psychiatrists to modernize the treatment of mental patients in British hospitals. As he says, in England they used to (as we in America still do), incarcerate insane people for years or a lifetime in a mental hospital. We confine them, in some instances for years without treatment, until they are beyond cure. Also, many of the old psychiatrists in England were like many psychiatrists in America today, who still believe in treating schizophrenics for years with psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, despite the fact that most of them get no better.
Sargant tells how he had great difficulty getting many of his British colleagues to try methods of treatment which had been found useful in other parts of the civilized world.