Mental Hygiene

Mental hygiene is the science of keeping the mind, brain and nerves of humans healthy. Application of the science is an art. Last week the greatest artists and scientists in the field assembled in Washington as the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene. They went from all the States, from every continent.

No specialist, but the organizer of specialists and prime U. S. exemplar of mental healing is Clifford Whittingham Beers, 54. As everyone who knows his Mind That Found Itself* realizes, the mental hygiene movement is peculiarly his.

For three years at the beginning of the century, Clifford Whittingham Beers was in hospitals and sanitoriums with a mental breakdown. It was caused by his foolish fear of being an epileptic, his overwork as a Yale undergraduate and later as an insurance clerk. Although wracked by wild illusions, his mind lucidly registered on his experiences. When he became well he had the impulse to document himself, to start a movement for the amelioration of the then unintelligently managed insane asylums. WTilliam James encouraged him. Psychiatrist Adolf Meyer invented for him the phrase "mental hygiene." Great names joined his movement for a National Committee on Mental Hygiene-- William Henry Welch, William Herbert Perry Faunce, Jacob Gould Schurman, Julia Clifford Lathrop. Twenty-two years ago this month 14 people, including zealous Mr. Beers, met at the New Haven home of Anson Phelps Stokes. Dr. Stokes now is canon of the Washington Cathedral, engaged in writing History of Universities from Their Origin to the Present Time. In 1908 he was the very active and increasingly powerful secretary of Yale University. With his hospitality Mr. Beers founded the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, pioneer body, and became its secretary. Next year he founded the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and became its secretary. Two years ago he founded the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene, and became its secretary. Last week he was functioning as secretary-general of the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene. Its proceedings gave him opportunity to fulfill a ten-year effort: an International Committee on Mental Hygiene, of which he became secretary. President of the international organization is Yale's Arthur Hiler Ruggles.

Tirelessly devoted to his movement, he was the chief instrument in bringing to his Congress not only the eminent psychiatrists of all continents, but professional societies little known to the general public--American Psychiatric Association, American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Occupation Therapy Association, American Association of Psychiatric Social Workers. Discussed were manifold aspects of their problems:

Artists. The painting of pictures is the activity of the normal mind which stands closest to insanity. Next come in close order sculpture, poetry, music. Psychiatrists are just beginning to interpret what they have long observed--the close connection between the psychopath and the artist on one hand, the psychopath and the criminal on the other.--Professor Wilhelm Weygandt of the University of Hamburg. His patients produce modernistic paintings--lop-sided faces, elongated beasts, geometrical patterns--comparable to those of the modern masters. But not all such artists, said he, are mentally unbalanced. Some draw distortedly for simple commercial reasons.

College Students. Yale, Clifford Whittingham Beers's college and one of the pioneers among U. S. universities in applying mental hygiene methods to muddled students, has Dr. Arthur Hiler Ruggles as consultant in mental hygiene. Dr. Ruggles, pursuing investigations approved by Yale's President James Rowland Angell, reported that college men and women who need mental treatment need it chiefly because: 1) the competitive side of the educational program puts a strain on the student; 2) adjustment is necessary when the student changes from a small school where he was the leader to a large university where he becomes lost; 3) anxiety states arise from a divided home or financial insecurity; 4) depression comes with "certain of the adolescent physiological changes."

Contagion. "Mental disorders are contagious. Those who live in congested districts, who lead busy lives in great commercial centres are in grave danger. If 500 normal persons were to be exposed in crowded quarters to five victims of mental diseases, the effects of those five abnormal persons would be felt by every one of the normal 500."--Professor Henri Laugier of the Sorbonne.

Miserable Smart Children. How to deal with superior-minded school children is a mighty problem for mental hygienists. Dr. Leta Sletter Hollingworth of Columbia defined the smart child's plight. If he is kept in a grade with ordinary children his own age, he does his school work so swiftly that he must idle and daydream, bad habits both. If he is advanced to the grade of his intellectual equals, he is the baby of his class, kept out of games and parties, criticized by his teacher for manual and emotional immaturity. Gifted girls have the special problem of wanting and being able to do many of the things custom forbids them. They must adjust themselves "to a sense of sex-inferiority, without losing self-respect and self-determination, on the one hand, and without becoming morbidly aggressive on the other."

Numbers. Every other bed in U. S. hospitals is occupied by a mental case. By 1970 there will be a million such cases, or 635 for every 100,000 people in the U. S. In 1880 there were only 63 per 100,000. Explanation: the wear-&-tear of an increasingly rushing civilization; public recognition that mental ills must be treated as well as bodily ills.--Dr. William Alanson White, superintendent of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, president of this International Congress.

Personality v. Morality. A full-blown personality leading a lively life is the best goal for humans. If sex morality operates against such an existence, morality must_ be condemned. But "emotional energies unconfined leave people flaccid. Arbitrarily confined, they burst out with explosive energy. But when disciplined willingly and intelligently, they may provide the motive power to carry human culture and human happiness to the new high levels of the future. . . . Orderliness, obedience, conformity, chastity, monogamy, such ideals are valid only if they promote deeper and more vital values; only if they serve to bring personalities into blossom; only if they call out to the full the possibilities of the self; only if they make for rich, intense, growing, creative experience. Morality must be a means, not an end." -- Professor Hornell Hart of Bryn Mawr.

Suicides. Patly did Dr. Haven Emerson of Columbia put the obligation of public health officers to deal not only with physical matters but also with causes of suicide, by asking: "Is it not at least as important that the suicide rate has risen from 4.9 to 19.7 for each 100,000 of our people in 70 years, as that the diabetes death rate has done about the same?"

*Doubleday, Doran, $2; first published 1910 by Longmans, Green with an introductory letter by Author Beers' great and sympathetic friend, the late William James.

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