The Problem of Suicide in the American Negro

(Concluded from page 204)

From such deductions the Negro is practically pictured psychologically, possessed with an essential personality pattern diluted by admixtures with the white group that dulls his instinctive behavior on one hand and provokes sublimation in face of a perplexing environment on the other. Both elements lead to frustration and unstable states; however, their instinctive psychology is not diluted sufficiently to permit ready exhaustion of the fear of self-preservation. There are periods of depression——what they term the “blues” but such states rarely become pathological, in fact from them arose not only their spirituals but the American jazz—they exhort the fact that they gave birth to the “blues”. Retrogradely, it is not inconceivable to see how simple psychology, regressive to an all but absolute instinctive level would manifest not in hopeless fatalism but rather in one colored with essentials of instinct and life, namely—fear in its literal meaning, leading to not too high a suicidal rate.

Education has its assets as well as its liabilities as is clearly seen in the fact that where intellectual development is highest, the rate of mental ills rises proportionately. This is a broad generality, however, an obvious historical and statistical deduction. Psychiatry today recognizes suicide in the true character of a mental disease, as the outcome of a pathological condition. The frustrations and useless activities which surround a person today, from youth to old age, the anxieties and nuisances together with the idea of special training for keeping abreast with the pace makers have undoubtedly been responsible in a degree for the increase of breakdowns in general which would include suicide. The Negro as a part of the same social setting has been subjected in a sense to such a state of conditions but in a degree not comparable to the white group as is