The Insane Society

About 50,000 Americans are dope addicts; a quarter of a million children between 7 and 17 are arraigned in juvenile courts each year, and 1,-750,000 serious crimes are committed by adults; 18 per cent of the draftees rejected by the armed forces have to be rejected for psycho-neurotic disorders; two million problem drinkers lose one out of twelve working months, and one hundred thousand of them have to be hospitalized for as much as six months. Of the whole population, one out of 18 persons will spend some time in a mental institution; 15 out of 100,000 adults will end their own lives and 8 will kill others. These and other signs of serious maladjustment, such as the divorce rate, the peace-of-soul-books and the increasing demand for family counseling, again raise Rousseau’s question whether the incidence of insanity and neurosis is related to the development of our civilization.

Or is all this merely a statistical illusion? No one, indeed, can be surprised that in our ...