Mental Diseases

There are about 10,500,000 such unfortunates in the United States. For them our only present answer is training and education within their limits. As for the future, our major hope is to cure mental deficiency by its prevention through research into its causes.

A second category of mental illness, known medically as dementia, is the loss of mental and emotional capacity through physical changes in the brain. Such changes can occur after severe brain injury, with the destruction of the brain areas by accident, a cancer, or an infection. They occur most commonly, however, as a result of hardening of the arteries in the brain, or by its degeneration with age, usually called senile degeneration.

Such illness obviously becomes more common as medicine conquers more and more causes of death and a greater number of people live into old age. It can be said that all of us—if we survive long enough—will finally develop brain degeneration and thus end up mentally ill, in the sense that we shall have lost our former faculties to a greater or lesser degree.

The third kind of mental disease is that which most people think of when they picture the mentally ill. This is psychosis, or, to use the ordinary word, insanity. This type of illness may manifest itself by profound changes in mood so that the sufferer is deeply depressed and discouraged and thinks himself worthless, a disease commonly known as depression, and probably the foremost cause of self-destruction. It may show itself by an opposite change in mood, with abnormal cheerfulness, out of keeping with reality, usually accompanied by difficulty in maintaining a consecutive conversation and inability to follow through on plans, with consequent unproductiveness.

More usually, this form of major mental illness may show such symptoms as the holding of ideas which are contrary to fact (delusions), hearing voices which are not present or seeing things which are not present (hallucinations), or notions that someone is after the patient, persecuting him, spying on him, reading his mind (paranoid ideas). Such persons have lost touch with reality, live in a world of their own, do not see things as most people see them.