Sadly and ironically, soon after I arrived in the 1960s, work opportunities for patients virtually disappeared, under the guise of protecting their rights. It was considered that having patients work in the kitchen or laundry or garden, or in sheltered workshops, constituted “exploitation.” This outlawing of work—based on legalistic notions of patients’ rights and not on their real needs—deprived many patients of an important form of therapy, something that could give them incentives and identities of an economic and social sort. Work could “normalize” and create community, could take patients
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