Man's Madness

While last week's full lunatic moon shone out of sight on the far side of the earth, 1,800 members of the American Psychiatric Association congregated in St. Louis each day to consider the madness of mankind. In kind and quantity this has increased so rapidly during late years that more than half the nation's hospital capacity is devoted to care of the mentally deranged and in many States the cost of running insane asylums is one of the largest items in the annual budget.

That the stress and strain of modern living is to blame for this increased incidence of insanity, Dr. Clarence Orion Cheney of Manhattan, the Association's retiring president, seriously doubts. "As early as 1734.'' he told his colleagues in St. Louis, "stress and strain of modern life was given as a cause of mental illness." Dr. Cheney declared there is more insanity now simply because more people live long enough to go crazy.

Another authoritative psychiatrist, Dr. Lee Wallingford Darrah of Gardner, Mass., wondered if there is a mentally normal person in the whole world. "Can it be," he asked, "that there is no such paragon as the normal person? Many text books do not even list 'normal' in their index. Such definitions as have been given are widely open to criticism and the conclusion is reached that normality is very difficult to find."

To prove his point Dr. Darrah went to history, discovered some soft-headed doings by folk generally considered to have been quite hardheaded. "Queen Victoria," he revealed, "commanded that her dead husband's clothing be laid out afresh every evening, also water in his basin, and this astonishing rite was performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly 40 years. . . . [There was also] Disraeli, twice premier of England, whom Lytton Strachey describes as 'a vainglorious creature racked by gout and asthma, dyed and corseted with a curl on his miserable old forehead kept in its place all night by a bandana handkerchief!' . . . Kant, while living in Holland, lived in 13 different places and changed his abode 24 times; Voltaire [was] inordinately vain, unscrupulous, once a forger and seemingly ever tempted by suicide. . . . William James often thought of suicide."

Dr. Charles Macfie Campbell, ingoing president of the American-Psychiatric Association, toyed with the notion of lending psychiatry to statecraft when he asked: "In the sphere of politics and statesmanship, is it possible to make the present available knowledge of human nature of any practical effect? ... As a beginning one might arrange a special consultation service for legislators and statesmen, where they could get some insight into the problems of their own personality as an introduction to a proper understanding of their fellows."

Psychiatry, as its specialists demonstrated at St. Louis last week, has not grown up into a clean-cut profession. The specialists showed more skill in discovering mental and emotional defects than in remedying them. In particular they seemed lost in the woods of psychobiology. According to this conception, which Dr. Adolf Meyer of Baltimore created, the well-rounded physician should simultaneously treat the mind, soul and body of each patient. To do the job well the physician must learn how each factor of that trinity affects the other in health and disease. Among consequences of Dr. Meyer's teachings were studies tendered in St. Louis on "The Psychic Component of the Disease Process (including convalescence) in Cardiac, Diabetic & Fracture Patients," "Female Sex Hormones in Involution Melancholia."

Among other psychiatric observations and problems present at St. Louis were:

P:"The single factor that a patient fears most after an operation is, not death, but pain. The most potent analgesic known is mental distraction."--Dr. Thomas Johannes Heldt, Detroit.

P:The accidental criminal is usually quite frank in admitting his crime. Psychopaths commit crimes against persons such as murder: non-psychopaths against property, such as burglary. Many psychopathic criminals are teetotalers.--Dr. Cornelius Collins Wholey, Pittsburgh.

P:"The majority of my alcoholic women stated they disliked the taste of liquor and felt that the main thing to be obtained from drinking was a lessening of their own tension and an increasing of their sociability. . . . Women drunkards have a strong attachment to their mothers, strong narcissism and strong inter-tension, making social contact difficult. . . . The alcoholic woman is always striving for social recognition and fears this will not be given. She experiences feelings of sexual inferiority and projects it in hallucinations to the outside world."--Dr. Frank Joseph Curran, Manhattan.

P:Tattooing is "related to narcissism, exhibitionism, inspectionism and skin-eroticism; to inversion, masochism, sadism, mutilations and sword-swallowing." --Dr. Frances Joseph Gerty, Chicago.

P:"Few persons suspect how many suicides in the true sense of the word are concealed behind our numerous automobile accidents. The practicing psychiatrist is only too familiar with the neurotic and ostensibly normal individual who labors under the pressure of a violent but unconscious trend of self-destruction, and who either runs his automobile into a telegraph pole or lets himself be run over by an approaching car."--Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, Manhattan.

P:"The seduced child* is usually very seductive, although it may not be clear whether this is the cause or effect of their experiences. ... In a young child, the sex experiences may tend to fixate infantile behavior. ... If the seducer is a parent, the child becomes doubly preoccupied with problems of family relationship. There is surprisingly little feeling of guilt and anxiety in these children. . . . Where the experience is repeated the children (at least girls) acquire a peculiar shallow callous attitude with an underlying softness appropriate to childhood. They tend to dissociate the experience from any concept of child-bearing or family life. While they obtain satisfaction from the experience, they learn only incidentally that it is wrong. They are rarely a menace to other children and can often be kept in children's institutions with immunity but if allowed in the community will apparently seek an adult partner on the street." --Drs. Lauretta Bender & Abraham Blau, Manhattan.

* That is, under the age of puberty, which in the U. S. is about 13 years for girls, 14 for boys.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.