Loony-bin

HENRY MORTON ROBINSON

NEUROSIS OF THE WELL-BRED.—The dark lightning of mental disease zigzags across the American sky, knifing its victims with increasing ferocity and democratic unconcern. There are 900,000 beds in the registered hospitals of the United States, and nearly half of them are occupied by persons suffering from nervous and mental diseases. For every person in a penitentiary, there are three in a madhouse. And if you cherish the comforting delusion that the inmates of our insane asylums are recruited solely from the lower ranks of society, lie prepared to uncherish such a delusion right now. Mental disease, like the Minotaur, is a delicate feeder; it battens on the best, and exacts a special tribute from the upper classes. It dotes, in particular, on members of the learned professions; on the offspring of socially correct hut biologically attenuated stock: and displays a quite touching preference for idle citizens who are financially able to cultivate a neurosis. Insanity graphs indicate that 80% of mental disease occurs at the extremes of the social scale, top and bottom—and these graphs have an alarming, Pisa-like slant the higher up you go.

The cost of maintaining our loony-bins (irreverent euphemism for hospitals where the doctors carry keys) is fantastic. In Massachusetts, 19 cents on every dollar of state tax is poured into her asylums; last year New York spent $47,000,000 caring for her insane patients-—an increase of 330% in the last decade. If mental disease continues to increase at the present rate there will not be a sane person among us in the year 2100. Long before that melancholy date has been reached, however, our fiscal machinery will have collapsed under the burden of maintaining our hospitals for the insane.

If the unfortunate members of these hospitals were the only ones affected, then the problem of mental disease might not rank as a major social ill. Hut even the most complacent observer may now note that the blight of mental disorder lies not exclusively upon the certified insane. Indeed, we are appalled by the vast and growing legion of neurotics, perverts, drug-addicts, psychopaths, ''failures," drunkards and maladjusted personalities that spend their lives outside asylums, but well within the penumbra of mental disease. Gazing about us, it seems that some gross and terrible shadow is lengthening and darkening over the human brain, threatening to extinguish it at the very moment when its light promised to become most luminous.

Why are men and women, many of them intelligent, educated, socially-favored persons, succumbing with such alarming readiness and frequency to mental disease? What subtle (law in adaptation betrays so many of our people just as they prepare to pick up the burden of maturity? What mysterious dissonance is jangling in our lives today? And where shall we seek the causes of these flaws and dissonances, that we may look behind them for a cure?

ESCAPE FROM A TROUBLED WORLD.— The word most frequently and authoritatively used in modern psychiatry is "conflict," and it is to this "conflict theory" that we must limit ourselves in the present brief analysis. Defining conflict in its everyday sense of "an encounter between contending forces," it becomes clear that no one who lives and breathes is exempted from such encounters. Bishops and boatswains, bankers and bummlers—we all have to make decisions and overcome obstacles, ethical, financial, psychic, twenty times a day. Such conflicts are bound to occur whenever our primary instincts come to grips with social restrictions, and if we are normal persons we make some kind of a dodge or adjustment that enables life to go on. But in an increasing number of cases, men and women are breaking down under the strain of making these adjustments, and are slipping helplessly into the crevasse of mental disease torn open by the struggle. Psychiatrists say that such persons are the victims of an unsolved conflict, either conscious or unconscious, and that the shearing power of this conflict has split them in twain. They are suffering from schizophrenia, or "split-mania"—a disease that comprises 60% of functional insanity, and is rapidly outstripping all other forms of mental disease in America.

In fleeing to the twilit realms of insanity, the schizophrene is merely leaving a hostile, restrictive world to enter a warm and liberating one. Day-dreaming, so familiar to all of us, is the handy key to an understanding of his malady. In day-dreams we retire from humiliating defeats at the hands of reality, and create a world of our own in which we are heroes of achievement, masterful and strong. Well, the poor schizophrene gets into this self-created world and doesn t want to leave it. Slipping deeper and deeper into his dreams, he withdraws entirely from the outer world of failure and restraint, integrates his whole life-energy around his inner phantasies, and finally beeomes a very King of Dreams in a nutshell universe of his own. In the competition between phantasy and reality, phantasy has won, and the taxpayer must foot a heavy bill for the victory.

But why, it will be asked, should such pitiful and unnecessary conflicts be taking place in the human soul in the year 1933? How do such conflicts germinate and why are they permitted to develop? And lastly, isn't society being just a trifle stupid when it contrives to make life so disagreeable that hundreds of thousands of its members are forced to take refuge in loony-bins?

Before we can have pat answers to these questions we must prowl about in that dim and bitterly disputed terrain where the individual meets the first outposts of society. For the two are enemies, and no amount of diplomatic intercourse can obscure that primary fact. A baby, for all his apparent helplessness, is a creature potentially dangerous to the social herd, and unless the whole force of the herd is bent early and constantly upon the suppression of his anti-social instincts he will grow up, alas, to he a despoiler of society. And so he is taught to submerge or disguise his most powerful instincts and to accommodate himself to a code of mores dedicated to the greatest good of the fewest (sic) number. That his fundamental energies are thus bandaged and contorted like the feet of Mandarin ladies, and that he is chock-full of thwarts and conflicts, is of secondary interest to society. For the sole object of this education is to mould him, by the time he reaches legal maturity, into a docile and therefore valuable member of the herd that formed him.

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST GROWING UP. —And here sprouts the germinating nub of all our psychic woes. For although our socially-milled product now looks like an adult, and is expected to hear up like one, he is actually a puffy, fahle-fed hoax, cracking at the first nip of frosty reality. For society, while it claims to he interested in developing mature individuals for its herd, is really not interested in developing any such animal at all. Individuals are dangerous and adults are too frightfully dangerous, "In combination," murmurs the herd suspiciously, "they would do us damage." And so society, which is an organism like you or me, or a horse-shoe crab or a loving parent, works with hut one swaddling end in view: to prolong the infancy of its members as long as possible. .All its agencies—the family, school, religion, the press, the radio, the stock exchange (Aladdin's lamp with a lottery twist), the movies and the advertisements—all these seem to he in a gigantic conspiracy to prevent anyone from getting past the psychic age of eleven. A brief article does not permit a detailed description of this juvenilizing program. hut in general it may he said that a rigid embargo is laid upon the importation of anything remotely resembling reality. Myth and molasses are the chief commodities; from infancy till death, syrupy fictions concerning the heart of a mother, romantic love, God's infinite mercy, the Sanctity of Six Percent and the blessedness of toil, are screamingly reiterated from the housetops, even though the solid earth shakes denial and heaven itself spits contempt.

If it he the test of adulthood to face reality with some appreciation of its relentless severity, and if it be the mark of psychic integration to face that reality alone (unsupported by mother-love, a sweetheart pal. or God the Father) then I should say that every wheel and piston of American society is whirring overtime to pulverize the human soul and to unfit it for the tests of maturity and the trials of individual hood.

But this systematic unmuscling of our people explains only half their high susceptibility to mental disease. Mere docility and sugar lapping do not cause insanity; there have been other paternalistic societies that were not overborne by mental ills. What special ingredient is present in the United States which fatally complicates the situation and causes the social mill to throw off such a debris of insanity, suicide and unhappiness?

THE TRAGIC WILL TO POWER.—This special ingredient has many manifestations, hut I think they can all he summed up briefly as the Fallacy of the Added Cubit. With us Americans the worship of the Added Cubit is a powerful cult; even in the wake of a gruelling depression the Will to Size blossoms feverishly in our hearts and restlessly seeks some crevice through which it may dart to fruition. Fertilized by the democratic myth, every doorstep sumac dreams of becoming a giant redwood; every village piano-teacher must give concerts in Carnegie Hall; never a Council Bluffs housewife hut aspires to the condition of a Fifth Avenue hostess: and even the rustiest of parochial pulpit-thumpers hearkens wistfully for the call to the arch-episcopal dais. And the illusion that it can "all come true" still prospers in our midst. If we expend enough energy (more, alas, than we have power to generate) and if we strain for that added cubit of stature which broke the lungs of Aesop's frog—we can all transform our sow's ear into a silken purse, or. to give the figure a sheet-music twang, we can all bring our Ship of Happiness into the Wonderful Harbor of Dreams.

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So runs the myth. And so do we run

It is a costly race. Even if it were confined to mature competitors there would he many defeats, more failures than success, painful retreats for every hard-won advance. But when a nation of adolescents gets out on the Road to Power, we have a spectacle that hasn't been equalled in absurdity and pathos since the Children's Crusade. e collapses, the flights, the ruin, the surrender,—all these are familiar, too terribly familiar, to those who stand at the gates of our asylums and admit the stragglers most seriously damaged. There is not room enough for the others. They must he shunted along somehow, usually on the hacks of the survivors.

The Viennese soul-masters stress in their psychiatric work the existence of tremendous conflicts raging on the nether ledges of the soul as it strives to repress its basic tendencies towards incest, murder, and cannibalism. These repressions, they say, unsuccessfully sublimated, account for the dark flux of mental disease in civilized nations. But I do not believe that it is our taboos, repressed or otherwise, that drive us to insanity. It is not that we exhaust our energy sitting on the lid of our baser selves; it is not from doing forbidden things that we crumble to premature decay. It is from attempting to do the approved, the recommended things, without preparation and without a stabilizing intimacy with reality, that we are led far out beyond our depths. It is as though we shoved off in frail boats, striking out across a wild and lonely sea—the breadth anti treachery of which had been carefully hidden from us by our teachers. With no knowledge of the stars we set up as navigators, at the first pufT of adversity we are blown off our course and spend our lives clinging to a precarious spar, captains of a soggy fate, masters of a fear-tossed soul.

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But there is even a deeper contradiction festering in our lives today. On the one hand we are being stampeded into a deepening social sympathy amounting to gross sentimentality—toward our fellow men, yet on tin* other hand we observe the uncontrolled operation of a dog-eat-dog reality that has not changed since the first gudgeon snapped at the first water-fly. Nor will it change, nor can it change; yet with pious canting saws about Service, Honesty and Samaritanism we try to block this survival-of-the-fittest truth out of the life picture. We cannot block it out, so we drape it with gauzy romanticisms. As a result we see a blur of Christ-like charity and sadistic cruelty in the same face, state, or corporation as two concepts of life struggle for mastery of our vision. It is something of this | blur that dances before the eyes of our people, plunges them into alternate murks of sentimentality and terror, leads them to expect more of mercy, love, and security than life can possibly offer, and finally causes them to break down mentally when these things are not forthcoming.

Don't take my word for it. Visit a loony-bin and listen to the delusionary babble of ex bubble-blowers. Through all their maunderings runs the dark cleavage of an unsolved conflict: tin* conflict between the world as it is and as they were taught to conceive it.

As long as these conflicts are present in American life we shall suffer—and pay. As long as we foster the day-dream and refuse to allow simple actuality to be scrutinized and taught; as long as we insist on overtaxing our sugar-buttressed souls: as long as we subscribe to the double morality j that obtains in business, politics, education, and love—just so long will the specter of insanity stalk boldly and more boldly among us. No legislative decree can exorcise this ghostly rapiner; no pulpit eloquence can holler him down. Triumphantly (as long as the present conflicts exist) he will continue to lead increasing numbers of our fellows to the loony-bin, chuckling at the stupidity of a nation that founds its skyscrapers in solid rock and erects its House of Souls on molasses and sand.