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During the past few years much interest has developed in the sociological aspects of mental hospitals. This volume presents the papers and discussions of a Conference on Socio-Environmental Aspects of Patient Treatment in Mental Hospitals held under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health in Boston in 1956. The material is arranged in an orderly and readable manner. There are thirty-eight chapters divided into five parts: Mental Hospital Organization
and Its Implications for Treatment; Therapeutic Personnel; The Ward; The Patient and the Extra-Hospital World; Conclusions.
A volume of this length can hardly be summarized in a relatively brief review; a few points, however, may be made. Smith and Levinson, in Major Aims and Organizational Characteristics of Mental Hospitals, suggest that the new goal in an organization is to permit 'the good effects of patients upon each other to be maximized', emphasizing the sensitiveness of patients to their milieu. They offer the startling suggestion that perhaps 'the traditional designation of mental hospitals as medical institutions is hindering their full development along new conceptual lines'. Gilbert and Levinson discuss 'custodialism' versus 'humanism', indicating by the former the traditional viewpoints and policies, and by the latter an 'attempt to recognize the individuality of each patient and to create a setting meeting a wide range of human needs in both patients and personnel'.
Several papers may be particularly commended—Jules Henry's Types of Institutional Structure; Talcott Parsons' The Mental Hospital as a Type of Organization; Morris Schwartz's What is a Therapeutic Milieu?. Maxwell Jones and Robert Rapoport contribute an interesting chapter on the absorption of new doctors into a Therapeutic Community, and T. P. Rees presents a brief paper on the psychiatric patient, the mental hospital, and the community.
One of the most valuable papers is that by J. Sanbourne Bockoven, Some Relationship