Sissy or Neurotic?

Has psychiatry played a useful role in the U.S. Army? This moot question got an airing last week in the American Mercury. Dr. Karl Murdock Bowman, president of the American Psychiatric Association and professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical School, answered charges by Psychologist Henry Charles Link.

Against Coddling. Dr. Link had asserted in the July Mercury that most military psychiatrists are "extremists." Said he:

P: They diagnose as psychoneurotic many men who are "sissies, poor sports, hypochondriacs and malingerers." This applies to many of the 802,000 men turned down in the draft for neuropsychiatric difficulties, and to hundreds of thousands dismissed from service.

P: They persist in "seeking out the tender shoots of mental illness and nurturing them into full bloom" and translating "moral values into pathological terms."

P: They treat "shell-shock" (a term "loosely applied to almost any neuropsychiatric condition") by coddling rather than discipline, thus teaching moral weaklings to foster their mental quirks.

Against Discipline. Dr. Bowman began his reply by stating that Dr. Link had expressed "more pointedly perhaps than any recent writer, the gross misconception in the public mind regarding psychiatry. ..." The Link discussion, according to Dr. Bowman, contained two plain errors: 1) except for the phrase " 'socalled shell-shock' . . . neither the American Army nor Navy uses the term, and never did"; 2) Dr. Link thinks the use of psychiatry in forward battle areas is novel when "even in the last war the whole basis of psychiatric treatment in the A.E.F. was exactly this." Continued Dr. Bowman:

P:"Psychiatry more than any other branch of medicine emphasizes the necessity of moral and ethical values. ... It is precisely at the point where the human character can no longer direct his God-given will-power that disease begins." The psychiatrist's most important role is as a diagnostician, to determine where that point is.

P: The mentally unfit should be barred from service because: 1) contrary to lay belief, discipline will not cure what ails them; 2) the services must not be hampered by the mentally unfit any more than by people with tuberculosis or punctured eardrums.

P: Military psychiatrists are reducing mental disease by establishing preventive systems at military posts. Success is often shown by a decrease in AWOLs.

P: Laymen still do not understand psychiatry, partly because of its mumbo-jumbo terminology. They still have "the human reaction of horror to psychiatric disease."

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