Sick Body, Sick Mind

No fewer than 172 out of 200 patients chosen at random as a cross section of those admitted to the Cincinnati General Hospital for surgery were sick in mind as well as body. Almost half of the 172 showed a "significant relationship" between their physical and mental illnesses --one had caused or aggravated the other.

The types of mental illness, a research team reported last week, ran the range--in various combinations--from everyday neuroses (one-third) with anxiety and depression to psychoses (21 1/2%) and character and behavior disorders (54%), with emotional instability and passive-aggressive personality the commonest types.

In 52 cases the physical had come first, the researchers found, and had been aggravated by the mental. But in almost as many cases psychic disturbances had led to behavior that produced physical injury, e.g., the passive-aggressive man who wrecked his car and suffered a fractured skull. If this had been his first accident, it might have been chance, but it was his fifth major accident by the age of 22. In at least six cases there was a nervous disorder producing all the signs of bodily illness--except that when the surgeons checked, they could find nothing wrong to operate on.

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