Monday, Oct. 19, 1931
Measured Madness
Once a person is committed to an insane asylum, his chances of getting out are small. The more he insists that he is sane, the more suspicion he attracts to himself. The struggle to convince can arouse actual dementia.* There are no precise gauges of mental normality.
Last week, however, Dr. Harriet Babcock was perfecting such a gauge at the Manhattan State Hospital. Primarily she intended to grade the progressive mental deterioration of paretics. Converse result was to mark the clearing up of all befuddled minds. Vocabularies provided her with a clue.
Words are among the first things an individual learns and among the last he forgets. Each year that one goes to school, from kindergarten to college, he acquires new sets of words. These sets are measurements of his intelligence, or his "vocabulary age." To get norms by which to gauge the demented, Dr. Babcock tested nurses, doctors, Harvard students, maids, clerks and others rated non-psychotic as samples of the run of mankind.
Then she gave them 30 tests of their mental nimbleness, including:
"What is your name?"
"Count backward from 20 to 1."
"Repeat: 6915847392."
"Repeat backward: 9562731647."
"Pronounce: Methodist Episcopal."
"Repeat: Nice kitty."
The only normal people whose mental nimbleness rated even with their intelligence were those of "vocabulary ages" 13, 14 and 15. In mental quickness younger minds averaged higher than their schooling; older minds, less high. Nonetheless, they provided standards by which to judge the demented.
Dr. Babcock used the same tests on inmates of state hospitals, found that most were psychotic, were getting worse. However, some showed improvement to such extent that, with other factors considered, they were paroled to guardians.
One inmate proved Dr. Babcock's method conclusively. His "vocabulary age" was 8, his intelligence test 9.40. His mind was superior to his education. Investigation showed that he was not demented. He was sent home.
When Dr. Babcock, a pretty, smartly dressed Rhode Island woman who earned A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees after her husband died, refines her tests to the perfection she seeks, they may be useful, said she last week, to define the brink between madness and mere befuddlement.
*See, inter alia, Clifford Whittingham Beers's A Mind That Found Itself (TIME, May 19, 1930).
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