Mental Illness Mental Retardation

College students generally have had little if any acquaintance with overt mental illness. Yet it is currently estimated that many more people in the United States (about 1 in 10) will be eventually admitted to hospitals for treatment of mental illness than will ever enter college.

The less a person knows about mental ill­ness, the more likely he is to consider it a "disgrace." This attitude reflects a fear of the unknown, a defeatist prejudice against false stereotypes, and a true ignorance of the na­ture of mental illness. Without denying the seriousness of some forms of the disease, we can nevertheless begin by recognizing these hopeful facts:

Mental illness today is largely curable. A diagnosis of mental illness is not a clap of doom. "No branch of medical science except obstetrics is blessed by so many recoveries as psychiatry," affirms Karl Menninger. And he speaks from the well-documented records of psychiatrists and hospitals. Furthermore, most attacks of mental illness, properly treated, are of short duration  a few weeks or months.

The introduction of new drugs in the 1950's gave fresh impetus and offers still wider hope for cure or relief of mental illness. These drugs, sometimes classified as "ataraxics," tranquilizers,   or  cerebral   stimulants   have reversed the long-time trend of increasing populations in mental hospitals The decline began in 1956.

The management of mild as well as severe mental illness has been improved by the new drugs. This is important when one recalls that at least half the patients who consult physicians are suifering from emotional dis­orders, which produce psychosomatic illness or psychogenic complaints.

Effective as it is, the treatment of mental disorders with drugs, by psychotherapy and in many other ways remains largely emperical: they work but no one knows exactly how or why. On the other hand a better understand­ing of the causes of mental illness has pre­sented new opportunities for its prevention

The key to the fuller understanding of mental illness is to be found in the workings of the unconscious mind and its mental mech­anisms. These offer rational explanations for the queer behavior, the strange feelings, and the otherwise apparently meaningless con­duct of the mentally ill, the neurotically dis­turbed, and even the criminally inclined. This knowledge can be misapplied, but it is a heartening fact that year after year more people are becoming concerned with the pre­vention of mental illness. Among them are parents, laymen, physicians, deans, social workers, teachers, nurses, psychologists, rec­reation leaders, and clergymen.

Research in mental illness is being in­creasingly well-supported, although the fi­nancial support is still far from adequate.

In short, there has been steady progress in the treatment and prevention of mental illness since the turn of the twentieth century.