PREVENTION OF MENTAL ILLNESS

How can mental illness be prevented? This is a large order, which used to go under the label of mental hygiene. This movement took form in the United States in 1907, following the publication of Clifford Beer's famous book, A Mind That Found Itself. Mental health must be considered not only a personal prob­lem but also a family, community, and public health problem. As an individual, you can make conscious efforts toward leading a well-balanced life, including work, play, love, and worship, and toward understanding your­self, which means accepting the fact that there is a worse side to your own nature, as there is indeed to everyone's.

As a parent, you can help prevent mental illness in your children by bringing them up wisely with a balance of tender loving care and consistent discipline that sets limits for action. Some roots of mental illness are set in childhood; emotional patterns are crystallized before intelligence takes over. Hence mental health becomes a family affair.

As a citizen you can support the mental health movement, lend a voice toward ade­quately staffed and supported mental hospi­tals, mental health clinics, and child guidance centers, both within and without the school system. You can speak up for an intelligent, well-informed attitude toward mental illness and break down prejudices against the men­tally ill. If a relative, friend, employee, or fellow worker seems to be "losing his grip," you can urge professional psychiatric atten­tion. Mental illness is, after all, an illness, not a shame or disgrace. Since recreation is a defense against mental illness, you can also support recreational facilities.

SUICIDE

Mental illnesses are not in themselves fa­tal, like pneumonia and heart disease, though it has often been observed that the life span of individuals suffering from severe forms is usually shorter than might otherwise have been expected. There is, however, one fatal termination of mental illness that occurs more commonly than generally supposed suicide. Every so often a college campus is shocked by this event, and the question arises, "Why did he do it?"

Suffice it to say that the "obvious reasons" are never the basic reasons. As Karl Men-ninger, one of the great students of the sub­ject, points out: individuals always in a measure create the unconscious environment in which they exist. Long before the final act, the suicide is helping to create the very trap of circumstances from which, by suicide, he takes flight. He has reached a delicate point, of psychic maladjustment where he at one and the same time (1) wishes to kill (anger), (2) wishes to be killed (expiation for guilt feelings), and (3) wishes to die (find peace without struggle). Fortunately for potential suicides, this delicate imbalance cannot be long maintained. If the suicidally inclined individual can be helped through his darkest moments or months, the fatal mood is not too likely to recur.

Rare, indeed, is the individual who has never entertained the ghostly thought of sui­cide. There are times in every life when, as Mark Twain put it, we would like to die -temporarily. But these wisps of a passing thought are not to be confused with the dan­gerous drive toward self-destruction that may occur in the deeply depressed, unconsciously troubled individual, who is a "man against himself."