Medicine: Kilroy Was Here

Veterans in various stages of khaki dress and nervousness walked into a massive grey building on Manhattan’s noisy Seventh Avenue. They came singly and in pairs, in tow of wives, sweethearts, mothers, fathers. On the ninth floor they found a friendly receptionist who took them in hand, ushered them into a pastel green haven with a fascinating array of gleaming gadgets and tweedy psychiatrists. The psychiatrists worked swiftly and efficiently. By nightfall 180 troubled veterans had spilled their principal worries, trooped out. Scrawled on the wall outside was an eloquent parting shot: “Kilroy was here.”*

That was a typical day last week at the Veterans Administration’s New York mental-hygiene clinic, which the VA thinks is the world’s largest. Just three months old, it already has 2,000 psychoneurotic patients, with an overflow of 1,500 more farmed out to private clinics and hospitals. Some 50 new patients turn up daily. One of 30 VA mental clinics recently set up throughout the U.S., it will soon be joined by 70 more.

The program will make VA easily the biggest dispenser of mass mental medicine in history. Army & Navy doctors are not greatly surprised; 63% of the medical discharges from the armed services in the U.S. were NP (neuropsychiatric) cases. In addition, many a soldier who stoically endured the war has cracked up since.

Psychiatric Stickler. Chief of the New York Mental Hygiene Service is bronzed, fawn-eared Psychiatrist Charles Brown who, as an A.A.F. flight surgeon, supervised treatment of some 15,000 neurotic or psychotic Army flyers during the war. Now a civilian again, he has a staff of 31 resident and consulting psychiatrists, and an elaborate assembly of psychiatric paraphernalia. It includes equipment for electric and insulin shock treatments, a six-channel electroencephalograph which can measure electric impulses in six parts of the brain at once, a collection of brand-new drugs, a “psychodrama” theater, movies, soundproofed ceilings, a relaxing lounge. All told the clinic has 38 rooms, and 28 more are to be added.

The clinic is prepared to treat any emotional or nervous disorder from a simple headache to dementia praecox; it farms out no psychotic cases. It has classified some 370 different types of headaches and experimented with a variety of new treatments; one of the most successful, developed by Dr. Arnold Friedman, is a novocaine injection in the head, which relaxes tense muscles and paves the way for persuading the patient that his headaches may disappear if he stops worrying about them.

A stickler for detail, Dr. Brown includes even the receptionist in his scheme of therapy, trains every clinic employe to put patients at ease. To find out more about his patients’ families and friends, he invites them to dances at the clinic. “A psychiatric social worker sensitized to the problem,” says Dr. Brown, “talks to the patient’s guests.”

Veterans’ emotional problems, says Dr. Brown, are basically no different from those of civilians. He believes that many a mentally ill veteran might easily have got over the shocks of his war experience without treatment if he had not run into home and job worries. One of the biggest factors in making many veterans mentally sick: the housing shortage, which forces jittery veterans to live with jittery relatives.

*”Kilroy” was World War IIs best-known G.I. No one ever saw him, no one ever caught up with him. But wherever G.I.s went, they found that Kilroy had preceded them, leaving his mark on privy and barracks walls. After Bikini it was found chalked on the battleship Pennsylvania. One of numerous G.I. theories about Kilroy: he was an AWOL infantryman, trying to let his commanding officer know where he was. But an A.A.F. sergeant, Francis J. Kilroy of Everett, Mass., said not at all: a pal of his had started it just as a gag.