Mental Hygiene Is On Increase Among American Universities

In a special article to the Herald-Tribune, Miss Mildred Adams discusses in detail the aims and methods of the new Department of Psychology at Brown University, and of the new course in psychology to be given at the University next year by Dr. Morton Prince '75. The article follows in part:

The mental, spiritual and emotional needs of students are to become matters for psychological study at Brown University. With this announcement, made last week by President W. H. P. Faunce, Brown joins a movement that, since the war, has been quietly spreading among the most progressive colleges of the country. If it develops as it has started this movement may have a marked influence on our future as a people. It is called "mental hygiene" and deals with the mental perturbations, emotional ups and downs, the behavior--in and out of class of college students.

For some ten college generations there has been increasingly competent provision for the physical health of students. Yet in spite of gymnasiums and compulsory athletics, physical examinations and infirmaries, certain ills continued. Each term some students would "break down" for no apparent reason. The Dean's office would be overcrowded with men whose delinquencies were the despair of their professors. Too many students, hand-picked for scholarship, failed through some hidden cause no physical examination could uncover. Once in a tragic while a student crime brought publicity of an unwelcome kind and awakened in the public mind a distrust of all colleges.

Sin Demands Study

Presidents, deans and students' boards wrestled with the problem, lectured and scolded and disciplined, knowing their measures inadequate but doing their best. Then the psychiatrist offered his services, and it began to be apparent that these outbreaks of "original sin" were really problems of personality demanding the skill of men trained in the tangled ways of mental and emotional disturbances.

Brown University will formally begin its work in mental hygiene when the fall term stants. The work will be done under the medical department, of which Dr. Alexander M. Burgess is head. Dr. Arthur H. Ruggles, head of the Butler hospital, will organize the work, and associated with him will be Dr. Charles A. MacDonald of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Paul Ewerhardt.

Not Pseudo-Science

President Faunce points to the human helpfulness of the new department. "This movement," he says, "is not to be confused with a kind of pseudo-science, morbidly interested in dissecting the student's mind rather than in helping a human being. The chief troubles of students as of all young people lie deeper than the mere physical. Students struggle with fears, repressions and other obstacles that are revealed to very few even of those who know them best. They come to college and are faced at once with the necessity of readjusting their lives to a new set of traditions, a new perspective. They need help in that very delicate task.

"Few persons comprehend the problems of adolescence. Youth is blamed instead of understood. Many of our problems of discipline and punishment need understanding, sympathy, psychological aid. The swift changes in the industrial order in the last twenty years have meant equally swift changes in the social order, and lives must be adjusted to meet them. Even older people are dazed, and too often young people are thrown completely off their balance."

Change Hard on Young

Dr. Faunce, who was a Baptist minister before he became President of Brown, spoke of the students need for spiritual guidance. He said that the change in standards of belief, the spiritual unrest of the age, is particularly hard on young people, and that he has known more than one case of breakdown from a warring of old beliefs against new teachings; an inability to think things through and arrive at an acceptable solution. Brown is calling a new spiritual counselor in the person of the Rev. O. T. Gilmore.

Dr. Arthur H. Ruggles, who is to organize the Brown work in mental hygiene, has been consultant in mental hygiene at Yale. His job, as he describes it, is "an endeavor to synthesize the whole human being, to insure the functioning of the whole individual." He says that body and mind, nerves and emotions must all be working together in karmony if a man or a woman is to live and work efficiently. There must be no hidden fears no gnawing worries, no black depressions or hysterical gayety.

Yale Men Examined

In most of the colleges that have realized this need the psychiatrist gives lectures in mental hygiene and acts as consultant for all sorts of student perplexities. Frequently he works under the department of health and has the complete cooperation of that department. At Yale all students receive thorough physical examinations and intelligence tests when they enter. So when a student consults Dr. Ruggles, whether he comes of his own accord or is sent by a member of the Faculty, he is preceded by the records of his physical condition and of his mental equipment.

"The thing we are particularly interested it: is the clearing up of what look like simple troubles before they have had a chance to get complicated," said Dr. Ruggles. "We want to teach the ways and the habits of mental and emotional health. If we can do that we may be able to prevent that most tragic waste; the breakdown of a finely trained mind."

Troubles Are Legion

Students have been quick to take advantage of this unusual opportunity for consultation. The problems they bring run the whole gamut of mental and emotional woes. Perhaps a boy has been "studying all the time," yet, because he worked inefficiently, has been doing poor work. Perhaps there have been sleepless nights that resulted in bad temper, indigestion and poor marks. Money troubles, obscure fears, estrangement between parents, tangled love affairs, black depressions, all of these and many more are laid before the psychiatrist in his capacity of consulting physician.

A dean's office is an extremely busy place, and a student can, as a rule, have only a few minutes. The doctor, on the other hand, allows any time up to two hours for a consultation. He does little talking and much listening, and he is not a disciplinarian. Any chaplain is obliged by training and conscience to preach moral warnings. The doctor's only duty is to discover causes, and by the discovery of these causes to find their cure. He cannot be shocked by delinquencies nor can he waste time in indignation.

The pioneer in this effort to treat the mental and emotional ills of students is said to have been Dr. Stewart Paton of Princeton, author of a celebrated book, "Human Behavior." An able psychiatrist, he realized the students' need of expert advice and offered his services as consultant.

Dr. Milton Harrington of Dartmouth, consulting psychiatrist and lecturer in mental hygiene, believes with Dr. Paton that the social value of the work is even more important than its individual aspect. He is interested in men as prospective members of society, and feels that psychiatry can render a great service in teaching men to order their lives and their living; to work consciously for the kind of a society they want to live in.

His work at Dartmouth is done as part of a "personnel" organization. Begun by Professor Bancroft, it was carried on by Dr. Husbandt, who spent the war period in the personnel department of the army, and was so impressed by certain of its features that he took them back to the campus. Here, too, as at Yale and Brown. Dr. Arthur Ruggles was called in to organize the psychiatric end of the work.

Practical Help Given

The personnel work is educational, vocational, mental and physical. Freshmen are helped over that terrible first home-sickness; are encouraged in scholastic plans and athletic aspirations. A check is kept on their health.

When students reach the dignity of juniors the committee's Chairman, Professor Harry Wellman, who is also Professor of Marketing in the Tuck School of Business, helps them and Summer work in line with what they look toward as a vocation. When they attain the heights of seniordom they consult him about that vitally important first job, to be sought after graduation.

The Department of Psychology and the psychiatrist are working together, the one to find out how student minds work, the other to apply that knowledge so that sick mind may be healed and taught to work in the most effective way.

Intelligence Tests Common

The psychological research that must necessarily lie behind the practice of psychiatry is going on in some form in almost all the colleges of the country. Use of intelligence tests calculated to get at a student's mental content has spread with astonishing rapidity. Originated by the famous Frenchman. Binet, they were brought to this country by Dr. H. H. Goddard. Until the war, knowledge of them was chiefly confined to experimental psychologists. Then the famous Army Alpha tests were devised, and intelligence testing took on the appearance of a popular sport.

At Dartmouth freshmen have an intelligence test within the first week or so of their arrival. Then as the term goes on scholastic marks are compared with the percentages indicated by the test. If a man whose test indicated that he belonged in the brightest 10 per cent., of the class gets marks that rank him in the dullest 10 per cent., he becomes an object of study.

It may be bad health, too many outside activities, complicated worries or half a dozen other causes. He is sent to a physician of body or of mind to be straightened out. On the other hand, if a man who tests low receives top marks in his examinations, the test and the course are scrutinized with equal care.

Another type of psychological research is to be instituted at Harvard University next fall with the creation of a new chair of abnormal and dynamic psychology. Dr. Morten Prince has been called from his private practice to take charges. He is the pioneer in psychopathology in the United States.

Dr. Prince is now a man of 70. His early professional years were devoted to philosophy and to the practice of medicine. He made important research in obscure nervous diseases before he became known as a psychologist, and is perhaps most famous for his researches in problems of multiple personality. His theories of the subconscious were well known among psychologists long before Freud's had become a familiar name in this country. Dr. Prince has been guest professor in many American universities. In Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh and London he has lectured on phases of abnormal psychology.

To Study Personality

His interests lie in the "why" of human behavior; in the forces within the personality that determine its actions. The new chair of dynamic and abnormal psychology which he will occupy is not to concern itself with the material of what is ordinarily considered academic psychology--sensations, perceptions, associations, the static mechanism of a mind--but rather with what might be called "purposive" psychology, human behavior and its driving forces.

It is through study of the abnormal that one gets a clearer knowledge of the normal. And men who teach well minds how to care for themselves must know what happens when they don't