The Importance of Being Neurotic

By the high-strung standards of modern psychiatry, perfectly "normal" people are fairly rare. One top authority gave the solemn opinion last week that in the whole U.S. there are only about 1,000,000 such folks, i.e., those who have no anxieties, no fears, no strong prejudices, no attractive vices. Everyone else he classifies as being, in great or small degree, on the abnormal side.

But eccentricity or the possession of a gnawing fear is not necessarily a handicap; it may be an asset. Dr. Earl D. Bond, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor, assured a convention of insurance doctors in Asheville, N.C. that "normal" people are not very "interesting''; they don't even seem to be entirely human. Other Bond findings:

P: The bulk of the U.S. population (perhaps 133,000,000 of the country's inhabitants) struggle or will struggle through life with "some unnecessary handicap of nervousness." They may be over-conscientious, oversensitive, or plagued by fears, prejudices, feelings of inferiority. Many individuals and families in this group are poor insurance risks because they seem to have an affinity for accidents (which psychiatrists explain as evidence of an unconscious urge to suicide). A classic case: a guilt-ridden patient who had had 24 major disasters, wrecked eleven automobiles. But this group also includes most leaders and "responsibility takers."

P: Next biggest group are the severely neurotic (about 2,500,000)--who are often dynamic, successful men & women. The neurotic may even be pretty good life-insurance risks, unless they are prone to hypertension or stomach ulcers. Constantly worrying (presumably about their insurance premiums, among other things), they tend to "live long and unhappily."

P: Of the 1,000,000 U.S. psychotics who are, or ought to be, in institutions, a large proportion are curable. Recovery from depression is "possible and usual." Two famous sufferers, cited by Dr. Bond, who recovered: Robert Burns and Abraham Lincoln.

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