Mental Disorders in Urban Areas. An Ecological Study of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses: By Robert E. L. Faris and H. Warren Dunham. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939. 264 pp.

This work is a fact finding effort in the borderline provinces between psychiatry and sociology. In essence the facts are few, but important. By statistical methods the authors plot the incidence

of psychoses relative to the distribution of population in a large city (Chicago). This distribution of population is studied in accordance with residence correlated against status, income, training, etc., in much the same way as it has been done with poverty, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, crime, suicide and other social phenomena capable of such classification.

The authors find that mental diseases decrease as one goes from the center of the city to its periphery. Paranoid schizophrenia is commonest in the rooming house districts, catatonia in the neighborhood of immigrant settlers; manic depressive psychosis is more common in areas with higher rentals, alcoholic psychoses in rooming house and immigrant areas; paresis in rooming house and negro communities and senile psychoses and arteriosclerosis in districts with the lowest percentage of home-owners.

The association of these psychoses with these different areas is a very significant finding. Its interpretation is much more difficult. For the greater part the authors are extremely cautious. The concentration of paranoid schizophrenia in rooming house districts suggests to the authors the explanation that communication is essential for normal mental development and that social isolation makes for mental breakdown. This is a typical 'explanation', and the facts as correlated can only terminate in the familiar hen and egg dilemma.

The facts the authors have uncovered will undoubtedly prove useful. Their interpretation as psycho-social phenomena will have to wait for a more accurate correlation between the conceptual systems used in sociology and psychiatry. The accurate interpretation of the significance of ecological distribution waits for—among other things—the study of the significance of social status in t