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Here presented in some seventy concise pages is an account of the background, rise, present development and needs of the mental hygiene movment in America. Devised to afford the uninformed layman of the social demands of the mentally ill in terms both of the rise of psychiatry since Pinel and of the rapid increases in mental illness in present times, the result is a brief serviceable bird's-eye view which may serve as introduction to other studies made at closer range.
The plight of mental patients before the American Civil War and the work of Dorothea Dix; the retrogression after 1865; advances in neurology and later conflict with psychiatrically oriented studies as to the conception and treatment of psychotics; Kraepelin's work and the shift in conception of causation from organic-toxic emphasis to dynamic patterns of the whole organism later developed through psychoanalysis, psycho-biology, etc.; the founding of the mental hygiene movement, its early structure, and its essential occupation with the prevention of mental disorder through extant social media—these form the main topics.
There may be traced in the bibliographical notes the works which have served as source for the greater part of the text. These are of the best—White's Forty Years of Psychiatry, Menninger's The Human Mind, etc.—and provide in point both of general and special studies an excellent guide to further acquaintance with the field. The chief note of the work at hand is the grave problem of the steady increase in mental illness and the need for more means with which to combat and prevent it. Psychiatry has not only discovered this preventive road but has provided the means