Mental Health Poll Concludes Therapy Works

Magazine notes

November Consumer Reports unveils results of what it calls the largest survey of consumers of mental health care. The survey of its own subscribers concludes that psychotherapy usually succeeds and that people “were just as satisfied and reported similar progress whether they saw a social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist.” It warns, however, that insurers are busy trying to limit their coverage of various therapies.

Remember the bashing that former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara took when his belated mea culpa over the Vietnam War policy he helped engineer, via his book “In Retrospect,” with critics saying he was about 30 years late? Interestingly, prominent Harvard political scientist Stanley Hoffmann praises it to the hilt in fall Dissent.

From the Oct. 14 London-based Economist newsweekly: “‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ wrote Robert Frost. ‘Or a Wal-Mart,’ he might add, were he to rise from his grave.” It’s from a story on how Vermont, the last state without a Wal-Mart, is now quite happy with the 50,000-square-foot outlet in the center of Bennington.

In light of the hoopla over the Million Man March in Washington, October Emerge, largely for black yuppies, is both timely and insightful in stories on the state of America’s black males. Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Davidson is especially good in checking out a Baltimore public housing project where, all too typically, male-headed households “number just 66 of 444, a mere 14.8 percent.” Says one longtime female resident: “The majority of children in this community are raising themselves.”

Oct. 23 New Yorker has its second superb piece in recent weeks from Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., the first on Colin Powell, this on black cultural leaders’ views of the O.J. Simpson case and the Million Man March. It’s a good look at the many strands of thought within the black community and white perceptions of blacks. Spike Lee, poet Rita Dove, novelist Walter Mosley and Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson are among those solicited, with Anita Hill bashing Simpson as a turncoat who’s attempted to align himself with a black community desperate for some sense of victory.