Finding Wackies

Most psychiatrists now practice in big cities (where some of them command fabulous fees), asylums, or in prisons (where inmates call them “bug doctors”). Last week a lot of them were expanding their practice to include the draft.

The Army knows from experience that a man may be both healthy and intelligent without having what it takes to be a good soldier. Psychopaths in uniforms upset the routine of their units, not only make bad soldiers themselves but frequently make trouble with their saner companions. Such misfits could be weeded out in advance, but there are not enough psychiatrists to do the job.

In the U. S. are no more than 4,000 trained psychiatrists, concentrated in a few areas. Chief problem of the Army, in its effort to keep out wackies, is how to divide 4,000 by 6,253 draft boards. Chief brooder over this tricky psycho-arithmetic problem is redhaired, chunky Colonel Leonard George Rowntree of Philadelphia Institute for Medical Research. Colonel Rowntree’s best solution to date: a group of 600 psychiatrists delegated to medical advisory boards in about 50 key cities. These psychiatrists conduct two-day seminars in various regions to tip off local board physicians to neurotic danger signals. As an example of the sort of man the Army would have taken in 1917 but hopes to keep out in 1941, Colonel Rowntree cites the hypothetical case of a 30-year-old clerk who comes from a large family, has good health but exaggerates his minor ailments, goes to bed for three or four days when he has a slight cold, may choose to subsist for days on unbleached barley and skim milk, has few friends, neither drinks, smokes nor pursues women. Colonel Rowntree says any good psychiatrist would keep such a man out of the Army.

Vague as such psychiadabra may seem to laymen, the Army’s psychiatrists have plenty of evidence to justify their concern. For the care of mentally disordered soldiers and veterans, the U. S. has spent $1,000,000,000 in 14 years. Less than half of these unfortunates have shell shock (from World War I) or other troubles directly attributable to military life. Moral: the rest should never have been admitted into the Army. Last week Colonel Rowntree’s assistants reported that 10% of volunteers taken into the U. S. Army in 1940 began to display psychiatric difficulties after they got to camp.