Nervous Nation

Into the high-ceilinged lobby of Manhattan's Hotel Pennsylvania, where the American Psychiatric Association was holding its annual meeting, flew a fat pigeon. Two days and many conferences later, pointedly ignored by hotel guests, the bird still perched or flapped over the potted palms and the crowded sofas. A pressroom aide explained: "Everyone was afraid to mention the pigeon in the lobby, with all these psychiatrists around."

The psychiatrists themselves had more solemn problems on their minds. Their profession, they thought, was facing a task even graver than its job in wartime. Said famed Psychoanalyst William C. Menninger, the new A.P.A. president-elect: "No longer is the world cursed with smallpox or cholera or yellow fever. . . . We have learned to eliminate space and to annihilate people, but we still lag far behind in learning how to get along with each other. . . . Is there any hope that medicine, through its Cinderella, psychiatry, can step forward to offer its therapeutic effort to a world full of unhappiness and maladjustment?"

Dr. Menninger's answer to his own question was a loud yea--with conditions. Psychiatrists, he said, could do the job--if there were enough of them. World War II had contributed to psychiatrists' experience in two important ways: 1) it had taught them that there are many more psychoneurotics at large than anyone had previously imagined (of all Army inductees, a startling 12% were rejected for mental disorders); and 2) it had provided clinical proof that no one, no matter how calm and complacent, is immune to psychoneurosis if the emotional strains get tough enough.

Psychiatrists think the strains are severe right now--what with the international situation, economic worries, a rising divorce rate, the disintegration of family life and the readjustment difficulties of veterans. The A.P.A. estimates that there are between eight and nine million psychoneurotics in the postwar U.S.

Too Little, Too Few. There are only 4,000 psychiatrists in the U.S. to help unstrung people out of their mental muddles. Only 4% of the current medical-training curriculum is devoted to psychiatry. Spending on mental disease is comparatively low: according to A.P.A., U.S. citizens lay out $100 per case per year for polio research v. a measly 25-c- per case for psychoneurosis.

Dr. Menninger agrees that the ideal way to cut down on mental upsets would be to eliminate their social causes: international tension, housing shortages, strikes, graft, racketeering. Meanwhile, the A.P.A. has set out to collect funds for research and public education. A.P.A.'s newly organized Psychiatric Foundation, starting life penniless, hopes by public education to attract more medical students into psychiatry, and to "combat the stigma connected with mental illness" which still keeps thousands of emotionally frazzled people from consulting a psychiatrist.

In the current American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Menninger gets right down to cases and gives a brisk lecture--not to society in general--but to his 4,000 psychiatric colleagues. To meet their postwar responsibilities, he implies, they had better pay less attention to rich ladies with imaginary complaints in their heads and jewels on their fingers, and more to the unhappy man in the streets. The war, says ex-Brigadier General Menninger (the Army's chief wartime psychiatrist) brought psychiatry to a crossroads: "We may continue to permit our chief emphasis to be . . . in seeing six or eight analytic patients a day in our ivory towers. We can go on talking our jargon . . . [or] we can turn up the road which leads us to the broad field of social interests."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.