Brain Trust

For the first time in the University's history a psychiatrist is now directing the Hygiene Department. This situation reflects not a trend in college students, but rather a trend in the thinking of college administrations. And the psychiatrist who initiated it is the same person who has been brought up river from the lower Charles to carry it out, Dana L. Farnsworth. He has identified himself with the college health movement in medicine, led it, and introduced mental hygiene in its program.

Because the ordinary student doesn't think of consulting a psychiatrist about problems, and even has an aversion to it, Farnsworth has to be an amazing advertising man. Fully aware that the public distrusts mental medicine, he has sold psychiatry to colleges across the country and included himself in the sale three times.

While a few schools had made psychiatric help available to students before the Second World War, Farnsworth first made it an integral part of college health programs when he became director of health at Williams in 1945. He moved to the comparable post at M.I.T. the next year, and because of his patient work there, Teach students and faculty members have no compunctions about dropping in to consult psychiatrists.

Farnsworth created confidence in his mental health program almost completely by himself. A friendly rugged six footer with a trace of a West Virginia drawl, he has a background of knowledge and experience to accompany his personality, and a familiarity with books that allows him to indulge in quoting Dostoevsky, Ortega y Gasset, or Gordon Allport. He was termed a "brilliant" student at the Harvard. Medical School, from which he graduated in 1933, and his education continued in the Navy, on a South Pacific Hospital ship, and Bethesda during World War II where he learned the mental problems of young men under the worst forms of stress.

But Farnsworth's first problem was explaining to the faculty the valve of psychiatry for both teacher and student. "There's not a student who gets in here who couldn't finish and get a degree, but some get involved and confused," he told them. "What we in the colleges need is a new idea of what our role toward students should be. Instead of trying to keep them out of trouble by protecting them, we need more emphasis on developing built-in controls."

After winning academic approval, he had to extend the atmosphere of confidence to the students. Here he was quick to realize the complications of psychiatry. "When a dean or teacher refers a student to a psychiatrist, he is quite naturally desirous of having some kind of follow-up report." But Farnsworth's gift of explanation has won him the trust of faculties, and his personal secrecy has secured the faith of students. Psychiatric records, for example, are not put on general medical reports. But students who want to talk something over with a psychiatrist wait for him in the same room as their ailing classmates with colds or bum legs. Psychiatry is thus kept discreetly separate, but nevertheless integrated with the regular medical program.

Farnsworth has not only introduced mental health to college hygiene however; he has expanded the hygiene department itself. At Tech he established occupational hygiene, concerned with inspecting and creating radioactive, toxic, and other "environmental" conditions of laboratories. He also instituted a system of insurance which extends protection beyond the hours when school is actually in session and the student is there. His reasons for such programs is simple: "What's the good of pouring the best education into somebody who is sick?"