Notes

THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR MENTAL HYGIENE has issued an appeal through George S. Stevenson, M.D., medical director, and Paul O. Komora, associate secretary, for the organization of the psychiatric profession for the national defense program. In an address on the subject, Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan of Washington stated recently at the Annual Luncheon meeting of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene that psychiatrists are 'singularly equipped, by reason of their familiarity with personality disorganization, to attack the problems involved in the preservation of the country's solidarity and morale', and discussed the rôle of the psychiatrist in the building up of the armed forces, in industrial mobilization, and in the promotion and protection of military and civilian morale. 'We are already involved in the strategy of terror,' Dr. Sullivan said. 'Psychiatrists are here face to face with weapons with which they have some ability to cope. I don't mean the psychiatrists can immediately evolve a counterstrategy with which to defeat the enemy's strategy of terror. I mean simply that our acquaintance with human destructiveness and with disintegration and disorganization of personality is invaluable equipment with which to attack problems in this field. If we are to meet the challenge, we must show an unparalleled readiness for organization and most extraordinary energy and application in accomplishing the tasks before us… Behind the war now involving most of the earth is a world revolutionary movement which requires a change of velocity in the capitalistic-democratic social systems if they are to survive… Psychiatry has suddenly found itself confronted with a stupendous opportunity for services vital to the protection of the very social system that finally evolved modern psychiatry itself. There is not one psychiatrist who can be spared from national mobilization. Our task will not be done unless everyone of us works as he has never worked before in a collaborat