Monday, Nov. 25, 1929

Mental Hygiene

Yale's President James Rowland Angell believes he has the sanest group of students in the world. That is because Yale was the first university to hire a staff psychiatrist. When a Yale man shows abnormality President Angell sends him to that psychiatrist, at present Dr. Clements Collard Fry. If Dr. Fry cannot straighten the student out, the boy is expelled. Only this month Yale dismissed two men, one a mental case, the other a sensual one. So President Angell boasted at the 20th anniversary dinner of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene in Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel.

The national committee which the once "insane" Clifford Whittingham Beers organized has successfully toiled in all states to improve the custody and treatment of the mentally unbalanced. With the help of Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness' commonwealth fund, it has established child guidance clinics to prevent mental troubles, Twenty-seven other countries have taken up the movement. Their representatives will meet at Washington next May as the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene. President Hoover is honorary president of the congress. Dr. William Alanson White of St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, who spoke lengthily at the Manhattan dinner last week, is actual president. Banker Thomas William Lamont is treasurer.