Lost & Found

A MIND MISLAID--Henry Collins Brown--Dutton ($2).

The solemn, you-may-be-next propaganda of psychiatry has pretty well trained the public, the hard-boiled included, not to make jokes about the insane. The theme of A Mind Mislaid is that the public has been overtrained, now takes mental illness much too seriously. A nervous breakdown, says 75-year-old Author Brown, is no worse than typhoid fever or double pneumonia. In the genial, conversational vein of his entertaining miscellanies of 19th Century New York history he now offers a relaxing account of his own three-year stay in famed Bloomingdale Hospital to prove the point.

To begin with, avers Author Brown, there is too much muddled sentimentalizing about society's responsibility for the insane. Most patients are the victims of their own ''damn foolishness." Business men (the largest group) at Bloomingdale were there because they were "hogs"' who cracked up trying to outdo Rockefeller. Another big group were reaping the just reward of philandering and boozing. ''Love nests rear nothing but 'cuckoos.' ' Then again, the hit-or-miss breeding of the human race "is largely to blame." His own breakdown occurred in 1929, after directorship of the Museum of the City of New-York, which he had worked ten years to found, was turned over to "a younger man from the wild and woolly West" (41-year-old Hardinge Scholle).

The first year was the hardest. Patient Brown tried to annoy the doctors as much as their elaborate, cheerful treatment annoyed him. But he enjoyed his ''diverting and interesting" companions. "General Foch" amused him especially. It was fun, at a safe distance, teasing the surly ones with such remarks as: "You big lazy bum, why don't you go home and go to work?" In time he noticed nothing particularly "goofy" about any of them. It was the intrusion of sane outsiders on Visitors' Day that brought back a depressing sense of something wrong.

"Favorite indoor sport" was the Suicide Club, which met to discuss how to live up to its slogan: "A bump a month." When a member succeeded in outwitting the enemy attendants, his memory was roundly cheered, his name entered on the roll of honor.

Author Brown cannot "recall any time when I did not think clearly," he was merely tired of living. A first sign of recovery was the return of his interest in reading. Asylum readers favored Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, the Saturday Evening Post. Except for suicide news, newspapers were seldom noticed. Most popular intellectual pursuit was crossword puzzles.

During his last year Author Brown gave up pacing 20 miles a day, was much in demand as a speaker at business men's luncheons. A free man again, he found the sane world much nicer but also stranger than a mental hospital. What best evokes for him his asylum days is the worried expression of the people on the streets of New York City, their mutterings to themselves. After four years the only asylum habit that clings to him is counting passengers as they get on and off elevators, to make sure none of them has slipped off to commit suicide.

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