N-P

Every month thousands of men return home from preinduction examinations or from the U.S. Army with N-P stamped on their medical records. N-P (neuropsychiatric) sometimes means insane but usually means psychoneurotic. What psychoneurotic means, few laymen know.* Most psychoneurotics do not know either. Many of them think they are insane or soon will be. So do family and neighbors who look askance, and employers who sometimes refuse jobs. (Last week the Army changed its N-P stamp to read "Unsuited for military service.") Because few NPs discuss their plight, few people realize how many there are.

But last week 2,000 psychiatrists at the 100th meeting of the American Psychiatric Association heard some startling figures from the Army's Colonel William Claire Menninger (brother of famed Psychiatrist Karl Menninger). Since Pearl Harbor the Army has turned down 1,340,000 men for neuropsychiatric causes, has discharged 216,000. These figures would be even higher if the men in Army neuropsychiatric wards were included.

Most practical report on the N-P problem was made to the meeting by New York Hospital's white-haired, 40-year-old Dr. Thomas Alexander Gumming Rennie. Dr. Rennie realized that discharged and rejected NPs need psychiatric care, without it might develop real mental illness. He also realized that there was no place where they could get such help. So last August he started a psychiatric clinic at the hospital, manned one night a week by twelve psychiatrists, a psychologist, seven social workers. The clinic gives psychiatric interviews, group treatment, occupational therapy, arranges social gatherings, dates, helps men get jobs.

Dr. Rennie told last week's meeting that the clinic has definitely proved its value to NPs. Of its 200 patients (about one-third from the Army, only 14 actual combat veterans), 104 are improved (some became perfectly well after only one one-hour psychiatric interview), many are still under treatment; a very few had to be sent to mental hospitals. (Some of these have since been discharged, now hold jobs.)

New York City already has six such psychiatric clinics; Boston has four, and there are a few others. But Dr. Rennie will not be satisfied until all available psychiatrists are helping in such clinics. Even so. most of the cases would go untended--the U.S. has only about 3,000 psychiatrists altogether, of whom 800 are at war.

Scientific Gobbledygool. The meeting also heard 132 other papers on psychiatry, many of them about the effects of battle on the nervous system, most of them in a kind of scientific gobbledygook ("mal-orientation," "preneurotic interval") very baffling to laymen. Some highlights :

P: Electrical sleep, an improvement on electric shock therapy for the insane, has been developed by a group of California doctors. A treatment lasts seven minutes. The doctors claim that their method is as effective as insulin shock against schizophrenia.

P: One gauge of war's effect on civilians is the number of "psychosomatic" ills (ulcers, headaches, tiredness, etc.) among draftees. On the basis of 13,000,000 physicals, Colonel Leonard George Rowntree says such ills have doubled since war began, have increased even among Negroes, who as a rule are not great worriers.

P: Deferment for husbands whose wives might break down when their husbands are inducted was suggested by the University of Michigan's Dr. Ralph M. Patterson. "Treatment of the wife . . . has proved extremely difficult."

P: Rockefeller inundation's Dr. Alan Gregg assailed psychiatrists because they are 1) uninformed about medicine, 2) inarticulate, 3) too busy, 4) too few.

* Psychoneurotics are high-strung, nervous people who are not crazy but who cannot face certain difficulties without developing bothersome symptoms such as headaches, tiredness, weakness, tremors, fears, insomnia, depression, obsessions, feelings of guilt.

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