Showing papers on "Workforce published in 1968"

Community child care.

Abstract: SIR,-Thank you for your leading, article \"Public Attitudes to Mental Health Educadon \" (13 January, p. 69). You quite clearly develop a sound argument favouring an opinion which I have concluded is axiomatic: presenting the public with the facts may not substantially alter previous opinions. The same results are evident in all sorts of campaigns such as immunization and safety programmes. As you say so well, there must be other less obvious but basically very powerful motives involved in these seemingly irrational decisions. There are indeed. And this is the very mechanism of psychology which we have been told of again and again by those mental health professionals who subscribe to the notion of unconscious motivation. All of us are guilty of the same curious failing you illustrate in the \"Public Attitudes\" comment: despite our having been educated about unconscious motives, we still try to conduct our studies and arrange our programmes using only superficially rational and objective variables. No one should be surprised by your findings, but many still are. Public and professional attitudes have nearly always been negative about the mentally ill because the afflicted represent (in imagination if not in fact) the very essence of what is contrary to our individual sense of integrity and control. Mental health progranmmes now enjoy considerable attention and financial support. But not because people's attitude has fundamentally changed about these conditions. No programme which does not take into account unconscious motives will succeed whether it be public education for mental health or strategies for international co-operation. If industry and advertising can help, it will only be because they tap these motives and then work them to the chosen ends. We would be better off to come to terms with the phenomenon of the unconscious directly-for it will not go away. Otherwise there will be a growing feeling of being manipulated against \" our wishes.\" -I am, etc., American Embassy, R. 0. SETTLE. Paris.