The Increase of Insanity.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 4, 26 January 1910, Page 63

The Increase of Insanity.

Eminent doctors have-renewed their alarms that insanity is greatly on the increase, but (says an American writer) it may only seem so. In the earlier days of our nation there was so much individuality, both of action and expression of opinion and of general behaviour and deportment, that the widest variations in demeanour’ were considered quite normal. Now any deviation from the accepted commonplace in manner or views is held to be eccentric if not worse. After centuries of the moulding influence of fixed ideas and fixed rules of conduct in China, the Chinese as a people came to look, speak, and act exactly alike. There is no insanity in China. Until Western nations appeared on its horizon with a few intellectual novelties as well as other bric-a-brac and Yankee notions there hadn't been a new idea in China for 2000 years. If we keep on locking up all our queer people in large brick and stone buildings and appointing ‘’attendants” to watch over them, or, more especially, if we otherwise punish them by shunning them, easting them out from fellowship and political and social communion because of their weird views of sociology, marriage, political economy, dre.ss reform, the nude in art, or vegetarianism, we shall in good time so discourage the development of original thought that we shall reach the restful, placid, and quite deceased mental state from which China is with great and painful struggles being resurrected. This is not to be taken as a reprehension of the restraint of persons who imagine they are fried eggs, and ask you for a piece of bread “in order that they may sit down,” or the poor victims of melancholia that are wretched in the hallucination that they are Lady Jane Grey. There is real insanity enough, but, as nearly half of it. according to the figures of the medical experts themselves arises from alcoholism, and 40 per font from “heredity,” which is largely alcoholism in its secondary or tertiary manifestation, it is reassuring to conclude that the human race, where it is not thus artificially contaminate! by the practice of bad habits, is essentially as good in its health of brain as primitive man.