Chapter 2383: Mind Assault (Part One)_1

"Good morning."

"Good morning. Oh, by the way, Doctor, how is the intern Duo An who started with your department yesterday? He has myocarditis, right? We were scared to death when he collapsed downstairs."

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

"Good heavens, I don't know how you've managed to get through. Our intern was taking a blood sugar test yesterday and made a large cut on the patient's finger, earning us two complaints from the family."

"Who doesn't make a fool of themselves during their internship?" Shiller chuckled and said, "Speaking of internship blunders, surgery has the most. You might see Godhand Mister going berserk with rage in a few days."

The female doctor opposite him laughed and waved her hand at Shiller, "I have to go on rounds now. Today, ward 1032 sent over a 'Mirror Person,' I have to take those little rascals to see, so they stop freaking out over everything."

Shiller waved goodbye as well and headed toward his office with a pile of medical records. Just as he sat down in his office chair, the phone rang.

"Hello, good day."

"Hello, good day, this is the emergency room. A late-stage pregnant patient was found to have self-harm scars on her arm during a premature delivery surgery, and she may need urgent psychological intervention. Please proceed to the obstetrics department immediately, I repeat..."

Shiller put down the phone and hurried towards the door, bumping into a figure. He stepped back to see it was an intern.

"Hello, Doctor. I have a few questions about the clinical intervention recording from yesterday, I was wondering when..."

"Not now, come with me to obstetrics." Shiller walked out the door, and the intern hurried after him. As they went downstairs, Shiller asked, "A pregnant woman was found with self-harm marks on her arm during delivery. What do you think might be the issue?"

"Prenatal anxiety disorder? In fact, severe prenatal anxiety and depression can lead to premature delivery. It should be intervened and treated as early as possible. If similar symptoms are discovered during labour, urgent psychological intervention is necessary to ensure the emotional and psychological stability of the expecting mother, helping hormone levels return to normal and effectively reducing the chances of postpartum depression..."

The intern answered clearly and decisively. Shiller nodded in approval, but it wasn't really surprising since this is the New York Elderly Association Hospital after all. Physicians who intern here are impeccable both in terms of education and abilities.

The reason why Shiller suddenly came back to work at the New York Elderly Association Hospital actually had to do with the contemporary era of New York.

As Earth's technology in Marvel experienced explosive growth, the amount of information people could access also increased. Even the already advanced new media industry was struggling to keep up with the overwhelming amount of information, not to mention the continual stream of data from the galaxy.

Official news from the Three Great Empires alone is too much for all of America's news media to cover in 24-hour rotations, not to mention various significant cosmic events.

With the development of productive forces, various orbital transport systems have replaced traditional transportation industries, causing sudden changes in international situations. People living in this era have seen their ways of life turn upside down within just a few years.

It's inevitable that numerous issues arise, with the most pressing being the growing demand for psychological counseling among the public.

In fact, America's mental health counseling industry is quite developed and professional, probably about 30 to 50 years ahead of most developing countries. Wealthier citizens seeking to address their emotional issues tend to book appointments with psychologists.

As long as you are a licensed regular doctor, you can expect about 20 to 30 patients a week, sometimes dealing with five to six patients in a single day.

Because a psychologist essentially acts as a general practitioner for mental health, consultations aren't as specialized as they are in regular hospitals. Hence, it often takes several hours to check one patient from start to finish. The work intensity is not only high but often exceeds standards.

In times of transition, people always feel more lost, and in America, where there is a tradition of mental health services, the number of appointments for psychological consultations, treatments, and psychiatric evaluations has astonishingly increased tenfold recently.

The problem is, because the development of psychological treatments started earlier in the United States and the training for psychologists is very specialized and strict, consider one fact: all licensed psychologists are graduates with double master's degrees or double doctorates from prestigious universities.

Not to mention an ordinary bachelor's degree, even a bachelor's from a prestigious university does not suffice, nor does a single master's or single doctorate. Even if you meet the educational requirements, you must have over 3,500 hours of clinical experience to qualify for the licensure board exams.

This screening mechanism indeed ensures that licensed practicing psychologists in the U.S. are of high quality, but the significant investment of time and money required has deterred the vast majority of people who wanted to pursue this path.

A significant contradiction is that if you want to graduate, you need to study, but if you want to amass 3,500 hours of clinical experience, you have to go out and intern. If you study first and then intern, you're likely to delay your graduation, which means paying tuition for an additional year, and tuition for clinical psychology is hefty.

If you want to study and intern at the same time, what you're spending is not just money, but your very life.

So even though practicing clinical psychologists in America make a great deal of money, the number of people who can obtain a license each year is still diminishing. Most normal people have many more professions to choose from that offer a better cost-performance ratio. For a psychologist to obtain a license, a little love for the profession is indispensable.

But now, as the demand for doctors increases and the number of doctors decreases, doctors, after all, are free agents—they can choose not to work if they have too much on their plate. However, ordinary people who can't get a standard psychological intervention due to a lack of doctors may very well escalate from common anxiety disorders, depression, or mere temporary emotional problems into aggressive psychopaths.

S.H.I.E.L.D. actually noticed this long ago. Often, when someone calls the police claiming there's a terrorist with superpowers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation passes the case to them, only for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to arrive and find that the so-called terrorists with superpowers are actually just mentally ill.

Once or twice is one thing, but there came a day when Nick wanted to transfer some agents to New Mexico to check inventory, only to find that all his agents had been dispatched. Upon investigation, he learned that more than twenty agents had been sent to the east side of the city for a major kidnapping case, and over ten were sent to the west for a bombing attack.

If you're wondering why the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn't handling it, the answer is they're already overwhelmed. A rash of all kinds of serious crimes seems to have erupted all at once, as if they were all rushing to meet year-end targets.

Nick isn't as foolish as the people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who treat only the symptoms and still think the surge in the crime rate is just a natural phenomenon. He understands that such a situation is either someone's doing or something's gone wrong.

After a thorough investigation, he found no puppet master pulling the strings. To his accuracy, the puppet master turned out to be himself.

After interviewing several murderers, Nick discovered a commonality: their mental states were all abnormal.

It was initially thought to be the handiwork of some supervillain with the ability to psychologically manipulate, and Purple Man was even caught and beaten for it. However, Shiller later analyzed and found that it had nothing to do with mental manipulation; it was purely due to the transition of the times leading to frequent psychological and emotional problems, with the number of psychologists not keeping pace, resulting in New York's public morals even beginning to edge closer to Gotham.

But now, Gotham is on the upswing, and New York is not looking to experience a renaissance. After considering, it was felt that merely calming the public with manipulated public opinion was ineffective; targeted treatment for specific problems was necessary.

The quality of psychologists produced by the past assessment procedures was indeed high; regardless of how complex the symptoms, as long as one could secure an appointment and attend regularly, there would be significant improvement after a treatment cycle, or at the very least, the condition would not worsen.

But the problem is that too few such professionals are being produced compared to the base number of patients with illnesses; there are not enough to fill the gaps. S.H.I.E.L.D. could only try everything to start lobbying Congress.

Things like reducing tuition fees, lowering student loan interest rates, relaxing entry requirements, are all long-term plans. But if immediate results are required in the short term, the focus needs to be on the interns who are about to graduate.

To be honest, judging by the education standards of top American universities, not a single intern at the licensing stage is weak. Many understand just about everything after interning for over a thousand hours—the rest of the time is just a matter of serving their time.

Therefore, the plan is to first shorten the internship period, then relax the entry requirements, and also recruit already practicing doctors back to mentor. This helps interns accumulate supervisory hours and enables them to learn more valuable skills in a shorter time, thus more efficiently tackling such problems.

The so-called supervisory hours are actually a requirement within the clinical internship hours. Essentially, clinical internships that are conducted in the presence of a mentor are dubbed supervisory hours, which typically total around 400 to 500 hours.

However, this part is often very strict; two people must work together for a full hour to count, and anything less than several dozen minutes doesn't qualify. Not to mention that there's a phase called "self-experience" before starting the internship, where an intern must see a psychologist themselves; if not enough time is "experienced," they cannot participate in the internship.

The vast majority of practicing clinical psychologists are also still repaying loans, so why would they give up starting their own lucrative private practices to stay at a hospital or school as a mere doctor or professor?

This has led to a severe shortage of mentors, which in turn has led to a further reduction in graduation rates. In the worst year, the rate could even drop to 40%, with only four in ten students being able to graduate on schedule, and among those who extend their study by a year, the graduation rate the following year might not even reach 50%. In this situation, just keep on reading, without a peep from the students.

There's no other solution to this issue but to spend money. Anyone who's willing to return to the hospital and school for mentoring can have their student loan forgiven.

Some might think that such a small benefit wouldn't be able to lure back those who are practicing outside and earning high incomes, but don't forget how expensive tuition is in America.

Considering the higher-ranking universities in the U.S. like Columbia University and Northwestern University, the tuition for graduate students in psychology costs $70,000 at one and $80,000 at the other per year, while traditional prestigious schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton are roughly around $50,000 or $60,000. Even if one graduates on time, they start off with student loans of over a hundred thousand dollars at the moment of graduation.

Psychologists make good incomes, but don't forget that the interest rate on graduate student loans is about 7%. Unless one can live frugally and pay off the loans within three years, many people find themselves paying off the increasing debt over and over again. For many, by the time their children are attending college, their own student loans are still not fully repaid.

So, student loan forgiveness holds a considerable allure for many practicing psychologists. At this point, S.H.I.E.L.D. throws in a very tempting chip—the increasingly popular field of Interstellar Society.