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Critical Reasoning
Currently, the number of first-time admissions of individuals diagnosed as manic-depressives to hospitals in Great Britain exceeds by nine times the number of admissions of such patients to public and private hospitals in the United States, even though the population size of the United States is many times that of Great Britain.
Which of the following, if true, would be most useful to an attempt to explain the paradox described above?
(A) The term ‘manic-depressive’ refers to a wider range of mentally ill patients in Great Britain than it does in the United States.
(B) The admission rate in the United States includes those individuals who visit clinics for the first time as well as those who are admitted directly to hospitals.
(C) A small percentage of patients diagnosed as manic-depressive in Great Britain are admitted to private nursing homes rather than hospitals.
(D) The variety of training institutions in psychology in the United States is greater than in Great Britain, reflecting the variety of schools of psychology that have developed in the United States.
(E) Seeking professional assistance for mental health problems no longer carries a social stigma in the United States, as it once did.
If (A) is true, it implies that many more types of mental illnesses come under the umbrella definition of ‘manic depression’ in Great Britain than in USA.
This could logically explain why those diagnosed as having ‘mental depression’ in Great Britain are many times more than those in USA, where these same persons would have been classified as suffering from diseases other than ‘mental-depression’.
So, (A) is the answer.
The other choices do not logically explain the paradoxical situation pointed out in the passage.
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