Mental Hygiene

Mental hospitals of the U. S. contain nearly 300,000 inmates; about 75,000 new ones enter yearly. What to do about them and how to prevent their increase were problems discussed last week in Manhattan by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of the Park Avenue Baptist Church, attended and argued for a form of confessional in Protestant churches as a means of relief. Said he: "The confessional, which Protestantism threw out the door, is coming back through the window, in utterly new forms, to be sure, with new methods and with an entirely new intellectual explanation appropriate to the Protestant churches, but motivated by a real determination to help meet the inward problems of individuals. Clergymen are giving different names to this form of activity such as 'trouble clinics', 'personal conferences on spiritual problems', 'the Protestant confessional'. The name makes little difference. What does matter is the renewed awareness in the churches that they are in danger of surrendering to the psychoanalyst that vast field of human need where the con fession of sin and spiritual misery is met with sympathetic and intelligent treatment."

George A. Wallace, superintendent of the Wrentham State School for the Feeble-Minded at Wrentham, Mass., found good in morons. Said he: "Who are the morons who are making trouble in the community? They are exactly the same classes who are making trouble on the higher mental levels--pathological liars, thieves, rovers, psychopathic personalities, neurasthenics and those suffering from laziness, brainstorms, inferiority complexes, temperamental episodes, emotional instability.

"It is therefore important that social maladjustment occurring in the moron group should be brought out in the open and should, as a problem, be viewed within the realm of mental hygiene and for practical purposes mental levels should be forgotten. . . . Some morons are normal; they react normally to their environment; they are honest, industrious and well poised."

Inasmuch as the problems of mental hygiene in the U. S. are so varied, many of them tenuous, the committee could formulate no exact program of relief. Their best was to advocate, and devote themselves to fighting bad conditions where they met them.

King George V's Physician Extraordinary, Edward Farquhar Buzzard, in London last week, took "the courage of my profession in my two hands" and warned religious faith healers not to interfere with mental hygiene efforts. Said he, a neurologist: "We [doctors] make no claim to cure disease. I look forward to a day when the church will have courage to say that it makes no claim to spiritual healing."