The Economics of Psychological Services: The Private Sector

Abstract

In a well-known address on applied psychology, James McKeen Cattell (1937) mentioned that in about 1885 he had had the idea of opening a kind of clinic at Columbia University, following the example of Frances Galton at the International Exposition in London, who had offered to test people and report their scores to them. Those who could pay would be charged a small fee for these services (this is how Galton had financed his testing), and this income would be used to defray the cost of testing the indigent. According to Cattell, this idea was quashed by President Low of Columbia, who did not think it proper for the university to sponsor a profit-making venture. In the late nineteenth century, when clinical psychology began, the notion of insurance covering mental health services would have seemed utopian indeed.