The mentally ill are no longer hounded as witches, no longer punished as criminals, no longer housed in prisons and poorhouses. They are treated less brutally than they were 100 years ago when Dorothea Lynde Dix began her 40-year crusade to better their lot. But their lot is still a wretched one, and the recovery rate in U.S. mental hospitals is not "appreciably higher" than it was 50 years ago. Albert Deutsch, medicine and social welfare columnist of the New York Star, has made an angry survey of state mental hospitals, The Shame of the States (Harcourt, Brace; $3). Deutsch gives...
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