Mad World

The idea that the world had gone crazy and that it was up to them to save it seemed to have gained hold on many of the U.S. psychiatrists who met last week in Atlantic City. Listening to the impassioned speeches at the American Neurological Association, no layman could doubt that the doctors' hearts were in the right place; but he could not help being surprised at some of their ideas. Over dinner tables, on the boardwalk, in hotel lobbies, strange views cropped up about mental health in Germany--many of them to the effect that sanity is no longer possible in a democracy, that only Totalitaria breeds healthy minds. Some public remarks:

> Dr. Harry Merrill Murdock of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Md. declared that U.S. citizens suffer from "great nervous stress [from] . . . so many terrifying alarms." In Germany, he continued, "control of neurosis has been attained. . . . Everyone has something to do and it is plain to him that what he is doing is a definite stride toward the goal he desires."

> When a member of the audience told Dr. Douglas Armour Thorn of Boston that in the U.S. "idle young people . . . exhaust nervous energies in the Boy Scouts and Y.M.C.A.," Dr. Thorn replied cryptically: "The American people have succumbed to a fatuous dependence on the cheerleader. . . . Our leaders lack the vision given to leaders in the totalitarian states which enables them to appreciate the vast magnitude of these [psychiatric] problems."

> Said Dr. Samuel Warren Hamilton of the U.S. Public Health Service: "If it were not for the war, Hitler's experiment in population control [of the feebleminded] would have been of great value for psychiatry."

> Said Dr. Edward John Kempf of Wading River, L.I., author of a famed text on psychopathology: "We have a deteriorating social system. We need to come to a reorganization which is more severe." Hitler is to be "congratulated" on the way he set out to eliminate the unfit.

In discovering German "sanity" last week, few of the doctors recalled that: 1) according to available statistics, 4.1 out of every 10,000 Germans commit suicide (in America the rate is 1.4); 2) despite Hitler's attempt to kill off the insane, the population of German lunatic asylums rose from 185,000 in 1923 to almost 350,000 in 1936. Nor did many of the psychiatrists recall how they had hailed recently a book (Beyond the Clinical Frontiers) by Dr. Edward Adam Strecker of the University of Pennsylvania, which put forth the theory that the Germans are victims of "mass psychoneurosis."

Preventing idiots and feeble-minded from breeding (although not necessarily by the German method of destroying them) is a principle which most U.S. psychiatrists accept. But few doctors would swallow the Nazi definition of "unfit" or "psychopath." In a 1938 issue of the official Militaerarzt (Army Doctor), German physicians were warned against "the most dangerous . . . element, the left psychopathic wing . . . those who . . . promote incitement and rebellion . . . those who, not lacking in intelligence . . . gather about themselves the discontented"--a description which in Germany applies rather better to democrats than to radicals.

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