ABSTRACT
In the 1980s psychiatric hospital treatment became a growth industry, attracting venture capitalists who developed successful for-profit psychiatric hospital chains. The struggle between psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry is a manifestation of the struggle between interpretation and management. Given the reality that resource limitation is here to stay, it is likely that the management-based, symptom-focused treatment approach of psychiatric hospitals will continue. Recognizing the role of resource management issues and bringing them to treatment team discussions, hospital administrators, and patients may provide an opportunity for psychoanalytically based interpretive work to make its way back into the management focus of even short-term psychiatric hospitals in the future. The new bottom line is that hospitals and hospital staffs are working harder and moving faster to stand still or even move backward.
