WAR AND INSANITY.

Evening Star, Issue 16987, 8 March 1919, Page 2

WAR AND INSANITY.

The -war has been responsible for no oncl of eurpriscs in evexy department of life. It has revealed to us how unreliable aro our preconceived opinions about men and tilings. Tako, for instance, the question of insanity. One would have predicted that the sorrow and -mission and tragedy of the war would.have affected the mental balance of many people. As a result we should have expected a more or less high increase in insanity. As a matter of fact, it is just the .reverse. There is an actual decrease in-the graver forms of mental disorders. So Dt Frank Hay tells us in his report on the mental hospitals of this. Dominion, and what ho says is borne out by testimonies of a similar kind/outside this country. This is decidedly curious, and invites investigation. ******* Dr TTay. who is in charge of our mental hospitals here, discusses the. subject in an interesting and suggestive way. He attributes the decrease, first of all, to the fact that the fathers and mothers of our soldiers ;ire made of stout and stern stuff, and so more abl& to withstand the shock* of anxieties and sorrows that would naturally come upon them. But ho thinks that the roal reason is that the parents and the wives of the soldiers have had developed within them a passion of altruism and a spirit of heroism. These have been forced into action in order to resist a barbaric assault on liberty and. justice. The flames of devotion and high thoughts thus kindled have consumed all lesser vanities and morbid desires and low ambitions. Tn addition to this, the " rulers of the > civilised nations placed upon them the [responsibility to understand, and, under - j standing, to direct tho higher social sense J now pervading and uniting these communities." Suffering-has united them in a bijrh fellowship. "They have had no reproaches shadowing them nor have they been worried by petty vexations ; and because they have had to do with great things, and have done them greatly, their Teason baa been preserved." All this is very interesting and suggestive. It is not too often, w© find so enlightening an analysis of cause and effect hi an official deliverance. ******* Dr Hay's analysis of the psychology of the situation is confirmed by that of an eminent English doctor, writing on the same subject in a Homo magazine. He too refers to this decrease in the gTavor forms of mental disease, and finds it at first sight curious and contradictory. His explanation gets down a bit deeper, but is on the whole very sim.iar to that of Dr Hay. ll© points out that insanity i« in a large degree the result of the compulsory struggle of civilised men and women against primitive impulse. Man was once an open-air denizen, a. hunter, and a fighter. But civilisation has caught him and bound him up in narrow conventions, wedged him into crowded, cities, chained him to ma-chinos, and forced him to work at uncongenial toil through all the hours of dull, drab days. He is thus denied the primitivo instincts of freedom, of tho large life of Nature, of,tho excitements of the chase or the combat. His life is a long weary round of unimpas-sioned work, varied perhaps once in tho year by a week or two of holidays. Tho short spell of joy and liberty only serves to wake to keener life the earl} instincts, and sends him back to chafe and fret all the more at the constraints that civilisation imposes upon him. Think, for instance, of almost 50 per cent, of the people of Scotland living ia houses of ono or two rooms ! No wonder crowds plunge into drink or gambling or excitement of some kind in order to forget for a time their sordid existence. Ot if some of them escape tliis fate they drift into a sort of dream-life that is unreal, and tends to morbidity and melancholy; and these are tho highways to mental disturbance and insanity. And then tho war carno. It ran liko a fire through tho conventionalities of civilisation. Those who, before it broke out, could afford to live a lazy, pleasure-loving, day-dreaming life found a new passion stirring within them; and just as the neurotic sufferers who have lain about in bed or easy chairs for montns or years often leap up and find the use of their legs and bodies when some great fear or alarm rushes upon them, so war came its a deliverance to these products of an enervating, luxurious life. The grim necessity that everybody should he up and doing took a passionate hold of them and put new life into them. It did tho same thing with tho workers in evory**sphere of life. It created new motives for labor. It lightened and brightened the. dull monotonous round of daily life. "It liberated a host of men and women from repressive and uncongenial employments, and gave them for the first time in their lives an enthusiasm for their work. . . Numbers of nervous folk had been kept' too busy to think about themselves or to find excuses for doing nothing m t-he reflection that they were the helpless victims of

******* All this ia extremely suggestive, and points many a moral. We can at present mention only two. The first is that we roust pay more respect to the primitive and | inherited instincts of humanity. Man is ' an open-air animal, jukl to house him and tie ham to a machine under hard, and sordid conditions is to drive him mad. You may, perhaps, get him into a mental h«--pital if there is not too many of him. If there is yon have rebellions of madmen, such as the world is now witnessing. The whole surfaco of civilisation is cracking | up, and the fiery issues .therefrom are ! frightening us all. But almost anything is better th-sn submission to the conditions •under which the masses of- the world were living. Think of this open-air animal man caught and cabined in cities of.the. earth in mean streets, in slums and alievs and dwellings where most of us would mako apologies to our hogs and dogs if we •housed them therein. Tho statistics of the Royal Commission on housing in Britain ia a dismaying revelation. Social workers, socialists, General Booth, and many more had cried Aloud about these things. But nobody heeded, or very few. It took the message to be written out by the war in letters of blood and flame before the Empire's eyes we're opened to the inhuman conditions under which the masses were existing. And now everybody is saying that th«ro must be a new world for these men and women. Here in this Dominion we may thank God it is different. Yet there is much need even among us for reform. It is not -work that kills ; it is its monotony and its apparent senselessness. The majority of workers are inspired by no high motives, no overmastering consciousness of duty Many of them,' indeed, neither fear God nor regard mart. All they believe is that they have threescore years and te nto spend on this earth, and they want to spend it as pleasantly as they ean. There is nothing before them but the grave, and that is tho end. Conscious] v or unconsciously they accept-not only the economic teaching of Karl Marx, but his theology as well. And his theology was blank materialism.

Ho regarded the idea of a future life, with all its high -tribunals of a phantom world, merely as a dope used by tho Church, to hold the masses in bond-ago to the present system of industrial slavery. It may be so; also it may not be so. Time will show. , So we reach a second lesson which Dr Hay's report suggests. We may put it in his own words. Referring to tho strain and stress which parents, wives, and lovers have had to endure, he says it created "a morally exalted community of suffering, They have had no reproaches shadowing them, nor have they been weighted by petty vexations; and because they have had to do with great things, and have done them greatly, their reason ha 6 been preserved." All that is very impressive. It suggests to us tho value of being inspired by high ideals and enlistment In a great cause. More than one-half of life's unhappiness arises from its pettiness, from its devotion to low aims and ambitions. They are not pitched high, and they end with self. The issue of that must be constant rasping of the nerves. It produces perpetual fret in the life, as tho waves tear and worry themselves over tho sunken reef which they are not deep enough to drown. Mr Sanborn, writing of Thoreau, says;— The atmosphare of earnest purposa which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever after porceptible, and imported an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. Exactly; many lives many homes turn into pocket copies of Hell for lack of such earnest purpose. Their aims and ideals are mean and trivial, so that nothing seems worth while. Work becomes drudgery, and even pleasures pall. Thackeray, in what has been called "one of tho most terrible passages in English literature," shows us the " magnificent genius of Swift torn by his own scepticism, poisoned by the cassock he had assumed, strangled in his bands, and dying at last as .Swift himself put it, like a rat in a hole." What & contrast is presented in the life of a later clerio, Dr Dale, of Birmingham ! His biographer says of him : " Ho lived under the benignant sway of a succession of great truths following one another like tho constellations of the heavens." And so his life was one of power, and of an ever-growing and over-widening beneficence and leadership. It is this having to do with great tilings, as Dr Hay puts it, and doing them greatly, that gives a zest to life, and dispels the atmosphere whoso breath slackens and slays the nerves and makes for insanity. In the avorago home how seldom anything great or unselfish gets a welcome. Parents and children rarely or ever look beyond their own oase or comfort or prosperity; never realise their obligations to the community ; never think of the corporate life of the nation of which they are members. Its claims and neods call to them frequently from Press and Platform, but, like Ulysses' sailors, they wax their ears and make themselves deaf to the appeals. It is only when some great crisis like the war bursts asunder the bonds of conventionality that they rouse themselves to altruistic thought and action. But when it is over they sink back again With blank gaze, Resigned to their ignoble days. Right wisely has it been said : What many of us need to forget our sorrows, to banish our weariness, to overcome our indifference and disgust with life, to fill our days with poetry and romance, is to enlist in a great cause, to become workers in that kingdom that ruleth all, and that ruloth all to the end of filling tho world with righteousness and peace. If the multitudes of our young men who have risen so splondidly to tho call of the colors would but continue to manifest the same spirit of heroism and sacrifice in the days of peace that now have dawned, we might indeed see a new world. But if they and we all sink back again into low levels of living, caring only for our own selfish ends, thinking only of what we can eat or drink, or dress, or dance, or smoke, then our " unreturning brave" will all have died in. vain, and those elusive tilings for which we are all in search —peace and happiness—will become not an abiding state of life, but a will-o'-the-wisp luring us to a darker doom.