We have recently had an excellent illustration of the benefits of applied psychiatry in the remarkable results achieved during the great war through the activities of the head of the neuropsychiatric division of the Surgeon General’s office and his staff[10] and those of the senior consultant in neuropsychiatry and his divisional associates in the American Expeditionary Force.  In no other body of recruits and in no other army than the American was a comparable success arrived at, and the credit for this is due to American applied psychiatry and its wisely chosen official representatives.

The active campaign for the preservation of the mental health of our people and for a better understanding and care of persons presenting abnormal mental symptoms carried on during the past decade by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene marks a new epoch in preventive medicine.[11]

The prevention of at least a large proportion of abnormal mental states through the timely application of the principles of mental hygiene is now recognized as a practically realizable ideal.  Many important reforms are now in process throughout the United States, no small part of them directly attributable to the active efforts of our leading psychiatrists and to our National Committee’s [Transcriber’s note:  original reads ‘Committe’s’] work.  The old “asylums” are being changed into “hospitals.”  Psychiatric clinics are becoming attached to teaching hospitals and psychiatric instruction in the medical schools is being vastly improved.  The mental symptoms of disease now receive attention in hospitals and in private practice and at a much earlier stage than formerly.  Even the courts, the prisons, and the reformatories are awakening to the importance of scientific psychiatry; before long penology may be brought more into accord with our newer and juster conceptions of the nature and origin of crime, dependency, and delinquency.  That schools of hygiene and the public health services must soon fall into line and consider mental hygiene seriously is obvious.  The objection sometimes made that the practical problems are too vague, not sufficiently concrete, to justify attack by public health officials is no longer valid.  In no direction, probably, could money and energy be more profitably spent during the period just ahead than in the support of a widely organized campaign for Mental Hygiene.[12] Psychiatrists can count upon internists and general practitioners to aid them in educating the public regarding the nature and desirability of this campaign.

Man is now consciously participating in the direction of his own evolution.  To cite England’s poet laureate, who, you will recall, is a physician:  “The proper work of his (man’s) mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and to conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them into subjection to the spirit.”

FOOTNOTES: