Mental Illness Program
In that same 1958 NEA interview, Sullivan noted his pride about the role that the show had had in improving the public's understanding of mental illness. Sullivan considered his May 17, 1953 telecast to be the single most important episode in the show's first decade. During that show, a salute to the popular Broadway director Joshua Logan, the two men were watching in the wings, and Sullivan asked Logan how he thought the show was doing. According to Sullivan, Logan told him that the show was dreadfully becoming "another one of those and-then-I-wrote shows"; Sullivan asked him what he should do about it, and Logan volunteered to talk about his experiences in a mental institution.
Sullivan took him up on the offer, and in retrospect believed that several advances in the treatment of mental illness could be attributed to the resulting publicity, including the repeal of a Pennsylvania law about the treatment of the mentally ill and the granting of funds for the construction of new psychiatric hospitals.
Read more about this topic: The Ed Sullivan Show
Famous quotes containing the words mental, illness and/or program:
“see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“Navajo men and boys have an odd way of showing their friendship. When two young men meet at the trading post, a “Sing”, or a dance they greet each other, inquire about the health of their respective families, then stand silently some ten or fifteen minutes while one feels the other’s arms, shoulders, and chest.”
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)