Mental diseases: a public health problemMay, James Vance
Science
Mental diseases: a public health problem
May, James Vance
Mental health services; Psychology, Pathological
If these matters are important in the public schools they must be even
more serious factors in higher education. Campbell[52] has raised the
question as to how far the universities "fulfill their responsibilities
with regard to the mental hygiene of the community? It is doubtful
whether they have attained a clear recognition of the fact that a
man's mind may be richly supplied with a great variety of special
information, that he may have attained a high intellectual level, and
yet the man's life may be rendered inefficient because it rests upon
insecure foundations. An education may enable a man to solve abstruse
intellectual problems, and yet leave him so hopelessly unable to cope
with a bereavement, an unsuccessful love affair, difficult marriage
relations, or even simple instructive impulses that he may lose
control of the direction of his life and for a period be dominated by
factors which have been almost entirely repressed in his conscious
life; the disorder may be so marked as to be included under the wide
term "insanity." To rear a superb intellectual structure on such a
foundation is surely not an ideal education; it is like building
a house on the sand, or, to speak more hygienically, it is like
building a superb mansion without paying any attention to the
plumbing." Deplorable as it may seem that such important elements in
the education of the individual have been overlooked, it is not nearly
so surprising as the fact that no instruction of any consequence is
given in psychiatry in the great majority of our medical schools.
This is a matter which is well worthy of attention and is fortunately
beginning to receive some consideration. A rather systematic campaign
has been instituted by the mental hygiene organizations to bring about
some instruction in these topics in our schools and universities,—a
campaign which promises to be productive of results sooner or later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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