Easing The Misery; A small army of therapists soothes a troubled nation.(Cover Story)

Byline: Carolyn Whelan

Life got you down? In recent times, as an economic depression wiped out bank savings and millions of jobs, all too many Argentines would have said yes. That helps explain why the South American giant is said to have more psychoanalysts per capita than any place in the world--some 15,000 in the capital of Buenos Aires alone. Global psychoanalytic associations count one third more members there than in New York City. There's even a popular TV drama in the country called "Vulnerables," which tracks the lives of several youths through their group-therapy sessions.

The wealthy in Argentina have seldom been averse to seeing a shrink--many are descendants of European immigrants who were themselves traumatized by World War II, and are conversant with Freud and Jung. Private rates these days are cheap: about $24 for an hour of talk, or one sixth the price in the 1990s, before the economy collapsed. Just before the crash, the government passed a law making mental-heath care a universal right. (Similar laws exist in Italy, France, Spain and Britain.) And since then, public-awareness campaigns have championed the benefits of therapy for those traumatized by the economic turmoil.

Poor Argentines have taken advantage, flocking to free government-owned or low-cost community-service health clinics even ...