Psychiatry

TO William Burroughs, it was "insufferable" -- a sign that The Man was reaching his tendrils deep into a poet's psyche. To some Beats and fellow travelers, Allen Ginsberg's time in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was sent by a judge as a very young man, seemed like a scene from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": establishment America grinding down a free spirit.

Rocco L. Motto, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was the medical director of the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, died Oct. 30. He was 89. The cause was leukemia, his daughter, Marilyn Motto Henkelman, told The Times. Motto's early years at Reiss-Davis, starting in 1953, coincided with "the golden years for psychoanalysis," said Dr. Heiman Van Dam, a longtime colleague.

PSYCHIATRIST couches around the world have been the launch point for countless painful explorations into memory, repression, angst and depression. So why do we find cartoons about shrinks so funny? Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, has a pretty detailed explanation that involves how both humor and psychoanalysis deal with base human desires, such as greed and sex, that we usually try to mask.

A periodic test that measures a man's response to erotic images is "Orwellian" because it examines his mind, not just his body, and should not be used because it deprives him of more freedom than necessary, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. In order to be released from prison, U.S.

A psychiatric examination performed on a former patient held for 13 years in a police-run Chinese mental hospital has concluded that there was no cause for his detention, human rights groups said Thursday in condemning Beijing's political abuse of psychiatry.

IT'S JAN. 1. Past time to get your inoculation against seasonal affective disorder, or SAD -- at least according to the American Psychiatric Assn. As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association ponders its latest iteration of feeling bad for the holidays. And what is the association selling? Mental illness.

Dr. James Q. Simmons III, who founded a groundbreaking inpatient program for severely mentally disturbed children and adolescents at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, died April 8 of cancer at his Encino home. He was 79. Simmons established the institute's program in 1962, when child psychiatry was still a relatively new field, to provide comprehensive evaluation and treatment for children and teenagers whose mental disorders were severe enough to warrant hospitalization.

Dr. Marshall Edelson, 76, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine who wrote nine books and numerous articles on the practice and theory of individual and group therapy, died of undisclosed causes Sunday at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. Edelson wrote several influential books in the 1960s and '70s that shaped the study of group behavior and sociotherapy.