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This study was made possible through aid granted by the Council for Research in the Social Sciences of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
The authors have made a comprehensive survey of the social aspects of mental disease with special emphasis placed upon the relationship of the social factors to biology and psychopathology.
Extensive statistics were utilized, available literature examined, and trips were made to various sections of the United States and to the principal countries of Europe to determine the influence of age, sex, marital status, race, nationality, urbanization, and various other cultural, social, and economic factors upon the incidence of mental diseases.
As a result of their studies, the authors conclude that the various peoples of the United States, the American Indian, the African Negro, and the various racial groups of all of the principal countries in Europe are susceptible to the same psychoses. They estimate also that in all probability the actual incidence of mental diseases would be no different in any one group if all statistics were based on a standardized population grouping.
The cultural background and the physical environment of many of the groups are quite different, but the basic mental symptoms remain the same. There are some variations in the incidence of specific psychoses among some of the groups. There was one exceptional finding in the case of the full-blooded American Indian in whom no instance of general paresis was reported.
The content of delusions and hallucinations was found to vary with the prevailing social customs. For example, in Soviet Russia the voice that torments the schizophrenic today is no longer the voice of God accusing him of sin but that of other workers who accuse the patient of not doing his share in the Five Year Plan. Delusions of grandeur are present in psychotic patients of present day Russia, but the grand dukes and kings are replaced by great engineers or inventors.
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