Insane History

THE MENTALLY ILL IN AMERICA -- Albert Deutsch-- Double day, Dor an ($3).

Haunting U. S. psychiatrists almost as much as it does their prospective patients is the alarming increase of modern mental diseases.* One out of every 22 persons, promises a New York State survey, may expect to spend some part of his life in a mental hospital. The gloomiest statisticians predict that in a couple of centuries everybody will be insane. The Mentally Ill in America is an authoritative, well-organized account of how the U. S. has coped with mental defectives thus far, attempts no predictions.

That modern treatment of mental diseases has gone a long way since colonial times is well illustrated by a description of such early methods of treatment as burning at the stake, iron shackles, "Madd-shirts," liberal doses of such drugs as "Spirit of Skull" (moss from the skull of a dead man unburied who had died a violent death). With exclusively mental hospitals limited to two until 1825, mental defectives were auctioned off to farmers, exhibited in cages for a fee, peddled at night from town to town in the hope of losing them. Called incurable until about 1830, insanity then enjoyed a craze of "curability," claiming 90% effectiveness (one patient "recovered" 46 times, died in an asylum). A pessimistic reaction revived an old slogan, "Once insane, always insane."

Of the doctors and reformers who pioneered U. S. psychiatry, Benjamin Rush showed the greatest ingenuity, Dorothea Dix (credited with founding or improving 32 mental hospitals) the greatest energy. Better known to present-day readers is Clifford Beers, whose autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself, published in 1908, created a sensation by exposing his typically brutal treatment in private, endowed and State hospitals during a three-year stay. On the crest of the ensuing public indignation was launched the modern mental hygiene movement, which during the World War received an impetus like neurology in the Civil War. When IQ tests tried out on the Army revealed that nearly half of the U. S. population was mentally defective, psychiatrists decided to look into the matter again, presently announced sweeping qualifications.

Most likely to interest readers are the closing chapters, dealing with the types of modern mental diseases, methods of treatment and their results, the difficulties which will continue to baffle psychiatrists until something is done about eliminating such breeders of mental diseases as poverty, wars, the wear & tear of living in a world that grows more disordered from day to day.

* On the books of 477 mental hospitals in the U. S. in 1934 were 451,672 patients (estimate first quarter of 1937 480,000), an eightfold increase during the last 50 years as against a twofold increase in population.

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