Chapter 2337: Mind Assault (Part I)

"Good morning."

"Good morning. Oh, right, Doctor, how is Duo'an, the intern who came to your department yesterday? His myocarditis is a bit better, right? He collapsed downstairs earlier, and it really gave us a scare."

"He's fine now. After discussing the situation with his family, he decided to take a year off from school. I only have 11 interns left in my hands now."

"Good heavens, I don't know how you manage to get through it. Yesterday, when our department's intern was checking blood glucose, he made a huge gash in a patient's finger, and we got two more complaints from the family."

"Who hasn't made a fool of themselves during their internship?" Schiller smiled and said, "If we're really talking about internship blunders, the surgery department has the most. You might see our Mr. Hand of God fuming and roaring in a few days."

The female doctor opposite him smiled, waved at Schiller, and said, "I'm going to do my rounds first. A 'mirror person' was sent to Room 1032 today. I have to lead those little brats to take a look so they don't get all worked up every single day."

Schiller also waved goodbye to her, clutching his medical records as he walked toward his office. Just as he sat down in his office chair, the phone rang.

"Hello, how can I help you?"

"Hello, this is the Emergency Department. A patient in her third trimester was found to have self-harm scars on her arm during a premature birth surgery. She may need emergency psychological intervention. Please head to the Obstetrics Department immediately. Repeating..."

Schiller put down the phone and hurried out the door. He bumped into a figure head-on; it was only after Schiller stepped back that he saw it was an intern.

"Hello, Doctor. I have a few questions while listening to the recording of yesterday's clinical intervention. I don't know when you might..."

"Let's not talk about that for now. Come with me to Obstetrics." Schiller walked out the door, and the intern hurried to follow him. As Schiller went down the stairs, he said, "A pregnant woman in premature labor was found by the doctor to have self-harm marks on her arm. What do you think the problem might be?"

"Prenatal anxiety? In fact, severe prenatal anxiety and depression can possibly lead to premature birth. It should be intervened and treated early. At the same time, if similar symptoms are found on the delivery table, emergency psychological intervention must be carried out to ensure the pregnant woman's psychological and emotional state is stable, allowing hormone levels to return to normal, which can also effectively reduce the probability of postpartum depression..."

The intern answered clearly and precisely. Schiller nodded, expressing his affirmation, but in fact, this was not surprising. After all, this was New York-Presbyterian Hospital; the doctors who could get in here for an internship were impeccable in both academic background and ability.

As for why Schiller suddenly returned to New York-Presbyterian to be a doctor, it was actually because of the current era's background in New York.

Earth's technology in the Marvel Universe was growing explosively, and the amount of information people could access was also increasing. Even the already highly developed new media industry couldn't handle so much information, because besides information on Earth, people were also continuously receiving information from within the galaxy.

The official news from the three major empires alone was enough to overwhelm all news media in the United States even with 24-hour rotation, not to mention various cosmic events.

And due to the development of productivity, various orbital transport systems replaced traditional transport industries, and the international situation changed very suddenly. For people living in this era, their lifestyles had undergone earth-shaking changes in just a few short years.

This inevitably led to many problems, and the primary contradiction was the public's increasingly growing need for psychological counseling.

In fact, the psychological counseling industry in the United States was quite developed and professional, probably 30 to 50 years ahead of most developing countries. Citizens with a little bit of assets would choose to book a psychologist after feeling emotional problems.

As long as you were a licensed, regular doctor, you would have about 20 to 30 visits a week, and in busy times, you would have to deal with five or six patients in a single day.

Because psychologists were actually equivalent to general practitioners in the psychological field, psychological counseling wasn't divided as finely as in regular hospitals—where you go here for this disease and there for that disease. Therefore, a single patient's visit often took several hours to check from start to finish. The work intensity was not only high, but often exceeded the limit.

In an era of change, people were always more confused, and in the United States, which had a tradition of psychological counseling services, the number of people booking psychological counseling, psychotherapy, and psychiatric examinations had simply skyrocketed by 10 times during this period.

Unfortunately, because psychotherapy in the United States developed relatively early, the training for psychologists was quite professional, and more importantly, the assessment was very strict. Just to mention one point: all licensed psychologists were double masters and double doctors from prestigious universities.

Let alone a regular undergraduate degree, even an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university wouldn't do, and even a single master's or single doctorate from a prestigious university wouldn't do. Even if you met the academic requirements, you had to have more than 3,500 hours of clinical experience to be eligible for the licensing exam.

This screening mechanism indeed kept the level of licensed psychologists in the United States relatively high, but the terrible time and money costs involved blocked most people who wanted to take this path.

A significant contradiction was that if you wanted to graduate, you had to study, but if you wanted to accumulate those 3,500 hours of clinical experience, you had to go out for an internship. If you studied first and then interned, you would probably have to delay graduation. Delaying graduation for a year meant paying another year's tuition, and the tuition for clinical psychology was even more of a heavy burden.

If you wanted to study and intern at the same time, what you were spending wasn't money, but your life.

Therefore, although licensed psychologists in the United States made a fortune, the number of people who could get a license every year was getting smaller and smaller. Most normal people had better cost-effective majors. It was impossible for psychologists who could get a license not to have a love for this profession.

But now, people's needs were growing, while doctors were becoming fewer. After all, a doctor was a free person; if there was too much work, they could choose not to do it. However, those ordinary people who couldn't get regular psychological intervention because they couldn't get an appointment with a doctor were very likely to deteriorate from ordinary anxiety, depression, or just temporary emotional problems into aggressive mental patients.

S. H. I. E. L. D. had actually discovered this point long ago. Many times, someone would call the police claiming there was a super-powered terrorist, and the FBI would transfer the case to them. When S. H. I. E. L. D. agents went over to look, it wasn't a super-powered terrorist at all, but completely a mental patient.

Once or twice was fine, until one day, Nick wanted to transfer people to New Mexico to take inventory, but found that all the agents had been sent out. He checked and found out that there was a major kidnapping case in the east of the city, which transferred more than 20 agents, and a terrorist bombing attack in the west of the city, which required more than 10 agents for the aftermath.

If you asked why the FBI didn't manage it, the answer was that they couldn't manage it anymore. Various large and small vicious crimes seemed to be rushing for performance at the end of the year, all breaking out at one point in time.

Nick wasn't as stupid as the FBI, treating the head when the head hurts and the foot when the foot hurts, thinking that the surge in crime was purely a natural phenomenon. He understood that if this situation wasn't caused by someone making trouble, then something must have gone wrong.

After checking around, he didn't find the mastermind. To be precise, the mastermind was actually himself.

After interviewing several murderers, Nick found a common point: their mental states were not very normal.

He originally thought it was the work of some super-criminal with mental intervention capabilities. Purple Man was even caught and beaten up. Finally, after Schiller analyzed it, he found that it had nothing to do with mind control or anything like that. It was purely that the change of era led to frequent psychological and emotional problems, and the number of psychologists couldn't keep up, which led to the folk customs in New York starting to approach Cat Getan.

But Cat Getan was getting better now, and New York didn't favor this kind of renaissance. A group of people studied it and felt that relying solely on manipulating public opinion to appease the public wasn't very effective; it was still necessary to treat the specific disease.

The quality of doctors produced by the previous psychologist assessment procedures was indeed high. Regardless of any difficult and complicated diseases, as long as you could make an appointment and go on time, after a course of treatment, not to mention a complete cure, there would definitely be a great improvement, and at least it would definitely not deteriorate.

But the problem is that the number of people cultivated this way is simply too small; compared to the current base of patients falling ill, it's not even enough to fill the gaps between their teeth. The Anquan Bureau has no choice but to try every possible method and begin lobbying the Congress.

Things like lowering tuition fees, reducing interest rates on student loans, and relaxing entry requirements are all long-term plans. To see results in the short term and fill the staffing shortage, they have to start with these interns who are already close to finishing their studies.

To be honest, judging by the educational standards of top American universities, not a single intern who has reached the stage of taking the licensing exam is weak. Many have also completed over 1,000 hours of internship and basically understand everything; the rest is just padding their hours.

Therefore, first shortening the internship duration, then relaxing entry requirements, and simultaneously bringing back doctors already in practice to serve as supervisors to help interns accumulate enough supervised hours—while also allowing them to learn more real substance in a short time—is the only way to solve this type of problem efficiently.

The so-called supervised hours are actually one of the requirements within the clinical internship duration. Simply put, clinical internships conducted while a supervisor is present are called supervised hours, which generally amount to about 400 to 500 hours.

However, this part is often strictly enforced; only when two people stand together for an hour does it count. A few dozen minutes here and there don't count, not to mention that before participating in the internship, there is a step called self-reflection, where the intern must see a psychiatrist themselves; if they don't complete enough hours, they cannot participate in the internship.

The vast majority of practicing psychiatrists are still carrying loans. If they don't go open private clinics to earn big money, how could they possibly stay at your hospital and school to be a lowly doctor or professor?

This leads to an extreme shortage of teaching staff, which in turn causes the graduation rate to drop further. The lowest year saw it drop to as low as 40%; only four out of every ten students could graduate smoothly that year. For those who stayed to study another year, the second-year graduation rate might not even reach 50%. You just go ahead and study this; once you start, you won't even make a sound.

There is no other way for this situation; just pay up. Whoever is willing to return to the hospital and school to supervise students will have all their tuition loans waived.

Some might think that with such meager benefits, how could they possibly lure back practicing physicians who are earning high salaries outside? But don't forget how expensive tuition is in the United States.

Looking at top-ranked domestic universities like Columbia University and Northwestern University, tuition for a psychology graduate student is 70,000 or 80,000 a year. Traditional prestigious schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton are also basically 50,000 or 60,000. Even if they can graduate normally, the moment they graduate, they start with over 100,000 dollars in student loans.

A psychiatrist's income is high, but don't forget that the interest rate on graduate student loans is around 7%. Unless one can live on air for three years to pay off the loans completely, many people find that the more they pay, the more they owe. Many people's children are already going to college, and their own student loans still aren't paid off.

Therefore, student loan forgiveness has considerable appeal for many practicing psychiatrists. At this time, the Anquan Bureau threw out another tempting bargaining chip: the currently trending Interstellar Sociology.