MENTAL DISORDERS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 243, 14 October 1933, Page 9

MENTAL DISORDERS

SOME MODERN CAUSES. A DOCTOR’S REVIEW. LONDON, Aug. 5. Dr. H. R. C. Rutherford, speaking in the neurology and psychological section of the British Medical Association Conference at Dublin, laid stress on the fact that little attention is paid to the influence of school life when considering mental disorders. The advance of education and the necessity for receiving and retaining in one’s memory a large amount of facts and figures which might (or might not) bo useful in a later period impose one of th< most difficult strains to bo experienced in life. When it was remembered that at adolescence the brain was immature, and that, although mental illness might have been absent up to the school age, yet it was likely that minor physical disturbances had been present for many years, and perhaps even since birth, it would not seem a matter for surprise that psychoses occurred frequently at this period. Dr. Rutherford would suggest that there was a danger in what one might term “the excessive education of the unfit,” and he would include within it backward children and those who showed any marked evidence of a nervous condition associated with a predisposition to mental illness, even though some of them might be of the brilliant type. They should hasten slowly during this period, and so remove any strain upon the intellect. How often did not one see a hitherto brilliant mind become less than mediocre, and make its possessor incapable of self-support? Tf such young people had boon removed early from school and put. to work upon the land, many of them might have become useful ‘citizens of the State.

”T have known excessive smoking to ho the only apparent exciting cause of several cases.” Dr. Rutherford added, ‘‘and, indeed. T regard it as being a fairly common contributory cause of mental illness. Its efforts are not so obvious as those of alcohol, for alcohol. lif taken in sufficient quantities, will soon terminate the desire for its continuance bv moans of the production of acute psychosis; but in the case of excessive smoking the effects are insidious. with the production of gastric disturbances, loss of appetite, and a generally lowered physical condition, which make a mental attack likely to occur with little other provocation. One contemplates with some alarm the future of a generation vet unborn, the mothers of which are harassed with a desire for slimness and excessive smoking. “The experiences of the war proved the extraordinary resistance of the brain to external injurv; and. indeed, the highly-skilled art of the brain sur geon, for which art 1 have the greatest respect and admiration, has proved it again and again. Tie ha« shaved off portions of the cortex, incised the substance of the brain, probed it. extracted neoplasms from it and even blown air into it. Notwithstanding all these things, ho has the satisfaction of sec ing his patient recover from the anaesthetic. with a sane mind. Tt is only when the cortex is affected widely, usually in some insidious manner by a toxin that wo got symptoms of mental