Insanity Zones

The nearer you live to the center of a large city, the more likely you are to go insane. If you live in an urbanized riverside area (like sections of St. Louis, Milwaukee, Omaha, Kansas City and Peoria by Clarence W. Schroeder. His findings (published in the current American Journal of Sociology) confirm the striking insanity pattern for Chicago (see cut) discovered by Robert Faris and H. Warren Dunham (Mental Disorders in Urban Areas) in 1939.

Psychiatrists have long known that city people go crazy more often than country people, but the discovery of well-defined insanity zones within cities surprised even psychiatrists. Roughly, what Schroeder and others believe is that the rate of lunacy lessens as you travel out from the heart of a city.

In Milwaukee "high rates [of insanity] are concentrated in the center of the city, in the rooming-house and Negro district. . . . High rates tend to follow river valleys." In a riverside district of Peoria, Ill., insanity is nine times as frequent as in another district on the bluffs. In Chicago, where the Chicago River turns to form a Y whose stem flows into Lake Michigan, the maximum concentration of insanity exactly coincides with this Y.

Researchers believe the urban insanity rate is not simply a manifestation of economic misfortune and underprivilege (the U.S. insanity rate rose almost none during the depression of the early 1930s). It cannot be correlated with average rents, property values, annual incomes. If poverty or insecurity were the primary cause of these marked insanity patterns, all blighted areas would have the same type of insanity. They don't. Each section of the modern city--each enviornmental pocket--seems to have its characteristic form of madness. Examples:

> The roomin-house districts breed paranoid schizophrenia--a split personality given to delusions of persecutions and grandeur, hallucinations, indifference to environment.

> Areas peopled mainly by the foreign-born produce catatonic schizophrenia--a split personality which is purposeless, impulsive, confused, given either to excitement or to stupor.

> Negro districts produce dementia paralytica or syphilitic collapse of the mind. But all forms of schizophrenia are remark ably frequent among white people living in predominantly Negro districts.

> Districts with the lowest percentage of home owners are characterized by senile psychoses with failing memory, frequent delusions of persecution.

> Higher-rent areas are characterized by manic-depressive psychoses--alternate periods of elation and morbid gloom. But manic-depressive insanity occurs everywhere. Probable reason: incipient manic depressives often have a psychotically quickened "drive" which carries them for a while into higher-income groups and hence into better residential districts.

The basic cause of the "urban insanity zones," researchers conclude, is the social disorganization of city life. Great numbers of foreign-born and their children have lost their old cultures and have not yet become integrated in U.S. life. In rooming-house districts, white-collar workers are isolated and lonely amid impersonal throngs. The number of unmarried men, socially and biologically at loose ends, increases toward a city's core. And as urbanization increases, the group control of a homogeneous society--symbolized by the U.S. back fence--disappears. Standards of group and personal behavior break down together when the anonymous city dweller has the "liberty" to drift into unconventionality and excess which are frequently the forerunners of mental crackup.

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