Some Phases of the Mental Hygiene Movement and the Scope of the Work of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Some Phases of the Mental Hygiene Movement and the Scope of the Work of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene It is right that, in an International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, the subject of Mental Hygiene should have especial representation. Though assigned, as a sub-section, to the section on the Hygiene of Infancy and Childhood, thus emphasizing its relations to inheritance on the one hand and to the early environmental period of the individual on the other, it might almost equally well, for other reasons, have been made a sub-division in any one of the main groups of the Congress. Indeed, so important is this subdivision for the welfare of individuals, of families, of communities, of nations, and of the human race in general, and so wide spread its ramifications, that committees on the organization of future Congresses might well consider the establishment of an additional main section, devoted entirely to Mental Hygiene. By a campaign for mental hygiene is meant a continuous effort directed toward conserving and improving the minds of the people, in other words, a systematic attempt to secure human brains, so naturally endowed and so nurtured, that people will think better, feel better, and act better, than they do now. Such a campaign was not to be expected before the rise of modern medicine. For only with this rise have we come to look upon states of mind as directly related to states of brain, to view insanity as disordered brain-function, and to recognize in imbecility, and in crime, the evidences of brain-defect. The imbecile, the hysterical, the epileptic, the insane, and the criminal, were formerly regarded sometimes as saints or prophets, sometimes as wizards or witches, often as the victims of demoniac possession, on the one hand to be revered or worshipped, or, on the other, to be burned or otherwise tortured. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.