Americans View Their Mental Health. A Nationwide Interview Survey. By Gerald Gurin, Joseph Veroff and Sheila Feld. A report to the Staff Director, Jack R. Ewalt. New York:  Basic Books 1960.  xxxv + 444 pp. $7.50.

This fourth volume in the monograph series of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health is an excellently written, exhaustive and cautious analysis of the problems Americans see themselves faced with and of their ways of dealing with these problems.

Whenever the authors present hypotheses to explain their findings they give several possible alternatives and concede that they may not have obtained all the information necessary to justify a definitive conclusion. The material is presented in a manner that is interesting to the expert and understandable to the layman. For example, the rationale of factor analysis is given.

2,460 “normal” adult Americans—excluding transients and persons in hospitals, prisons and other institutions—were interviewed for an average of two hours about their self-image, their worries, degree of happiness, satisfactions and dissatisfactions, fears of impending nervous breakdown and what they did about their problems, whom they consulted, if anyone, and how satisfied they were with the help they received. The self-image was inferred from replies to questions about how the respondents considered themselves different from other people, how they would like their children of the same sex to differ from them and what they considered their good and strongest points. Worries and unhappiness were found not necessarily related.

Many of the findings confirm general assumptions about the concerns of the American people; some are unexpected. Among the latter is the observation that world tensions and fear of atomic war do not count among the worries of Americans. Among the former one finds that people who consider a problem as located within themselves look more readily for some kind of psychiatric help than those who externalize their problems. Yet, a large number of those who do not recognize their problems as psychological do go for help to psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health agencies.

This study presents mental health problems not from