Each year, about 1,200 slots are available at U. S. hospitals for med-ical students who want to train as psychiatrists. Once, those positions attracted the best and brightest medical graduates. Now, only a third of those places are filled by American medical students—most of them drawn from the bottom quarter of their class. The decline in psychiatry has been matched by a deterioration in the availability of mental-health care: The number of patients in public mental hospitals has fallen from a peak of 558,000 in 1955 to 60,000 today.
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