“At La Charité Hospital in Berlin, the visitor enters a small park, and Dr. Ziehen’s clinic is but one of many detached buildings devoted to special diseases. It is as easy and simple for the patient suffering in mind to get advice there as for another with eye and lung trouble.” Let it be noted that none of these German patients, on returning to their relatives and friends, suffer from the stigma of having been to an asylum. In our country some of those same friends during the patient’s absence would often have been engaged in “sympathetically” spreading the news of the sufferer’s absence and his whereabouts to everybody in the district. To a certain type of mind there is a ghoulish fascination in gloating over the illnesses and afflictions of neighbours. Even though people addicted to such habits may salve their own consciences by exclaiming “poor fellow” at the end of their narrative, the effect of their conduct is none the less brutal and offensive. This is not the place for the discussion of so remarkable and important a phenomenon of social psychology. Nevertheless it plays a great part in the causation of the prevalent dread of treatment for mental disorder. For many reasons the psychiatric clinic is not regarded by the public as a “lunatic” asylum. In the Giessen clinic in Germany, for instance, both nervous and mental diseases are treated. The patient afflicted with tremor or a paralysed finger visits this institution as well as the sufferer whose troubles if neglected might develop into mental disease. Difficult medico-legal cases resulting from such incidents as those arising from the claims by workmen and others for compensation after accident are sent to this clinic for observation and opinion. “Rest-Cures” and similar treatment are also carried out there. The official title of the institution, displayed at the entrance, is “Clinic for Mental and Nervous Diseases.” The institution is therefore regarded by most people in quite a different light from the asylum, and it is not spoken of by the general public with bated breath. One of us, while working in the laboratory of a German psychiatric clinic, was introduced to a visitor who made some remark about “when I was here.” To the question, “Were you on the staff, then?” the visitor answered quite naturally, “Oh no, I was here as a patient.”