At the Mental Seams

At first glance, the health of Western civilization looks pretty good (e.g., people live longer than they used to). But Scottish Psychiatrist James L. Halliday, who took a long look, disagrees. A psychosomatic (mindbody) medicine man, he has come forth with a diagnosis that might not surprise Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr or Historian Arnold J. Toynbee: modern society is a very sick patient. The disease: an ailing mind. Dr. Halliday's findings are published this week in Psychosocial Medicine: A Study of the Sick Society (Norton; $3.50).

The Symptoms. Dr. Halliday, onetime general practitioner and now a member of Scotland's Department of Health, finds many signs that society is coming apart at the mental seams. Except for a wartime spurt, the birthrate is declining, owing not to poor health but to the neurotic anxieties of parents. While the birthrate goes down, psychosomatic complaints such as peptic (stomach) ulcers go up.

In Scotland, during the depression of the 1930s, gastritis increased by 120%, nervous debility by 100%. In the U.S., he says, social disintegration is proceeding so fast that even Negroes, once almost immune, are getting peptic ulcers; from 1936 to 1945, the incidence of ulcers among whites increased 44%, among Negroes 133%.

With the breakdown of the father-dominated family and the emancipation of women, Dr. Halliday finds, there has been a significant sexual shift in psychosomatic diseases. In the 19th Century more women than men got ulcers and exophthalmic goiter; since 1900 it has been the other way around, increasingly so. During the late 19th Century, twice as many men as women got diabetes; by the 1930s there were two or three women with diabetes to every male sufferer. Dr. Halliday, who is married and the father of two children, comments: "The personality type of male was apparently becoming in some ways more feminine and that of females more masculine than their respective standard types in the 19th Century."

Western civilization's case history as drawn up by Dr. Halliday shows political and cultural symptoms, too: "social fragmentation," revealed by a rash of class warfare; increasing "intrusion of manifestations of the primitive and visceral," with "love becoming no longer sacramental but excremental"; a decline in religious faith, and loss of man's sense of his origins and destiny.

The Causes. Religion's decline after the 1870s helped increase man's natural feeling of insecurity, and is thus a cause as well as a symptom, Dr. Halliday believes. Western society also suffered from changes in child-rearing, he thinks. Dr. Halliday looks skeptically at the flush toilet, and deplores its leading to too-early toilet training, hence frustration. The decline in breast-feeding and the general use of baby carriages, he thinks, robbed children of needed, reassuring contact with their mothers. Many changes were good physiologically, but bad psychologically.

If the child is increasingly insecure, so is the adult in his bright new world. As cities grew, and machines multiplied, men lost their feeling for "manipulative creativity," and to inner insecurity was added "the insecurity of the collapsing platform" (i.e., men did not know where they stood in society, or how long they could keep their footing).

The Cure. "It is neither sense nor science to concentrate our thoughts and endeavors on the physical aspects of nature to the neglect of its spiritual or psychological aspects," writes Dr. Halliday; "it is by comprehension of these alone that man can consciously save himself from further social catastrophe and even destruction."

Medicine's Job? Doctors must get better training in psychosomatic medicine, learn to recognize the serious biological effects of social sickness. A new kind of "group practice" would help them understand psychosocial medicine; the group should include doctors, social workers, nurses, clerks to take care of records, representatives of government health & welfare departments, perhaps of industry. The group might decide that while the symptoms were the patient's, the causes were society's, and recommend changes.

Dr. Halliday's psychosocial medicine would include "biopolitics." He gives a practical tip: avoid political leaders who themselves have recurring psychosomatic illnesses like skin troubles, stomach ulcers, rheumatism.

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