Medicine: Everybody's Mental Health

Sick and tired of widely parroted statistics that one out of 16 persons (or, some say, one out of ten) will spend part of his life in a mental hospital, famed Psychiatrist William C. Menninger came out with a sweeping statistic of his own last week. He told the National Association for Mental Health: "Even the most startling of these figures . . . refer only to extreme cases of mental disorder. [They] overlook the common, everyday emotional disturbances which can be as upsetting and incapacitating as many of the physical illnesses. When we take these into account, the toll of mental ill health must be reckoned as one in one, for there isn't a person who does not experience frequently a mental or emotional disturbance severe enough to disrupt his functioning as a welladjusted, happy and efficiently performing individual."

Among those whose illnesses are severe enough to need hospitalization, reported the association's medical consultant, Manhattan's Dr. George S. Stevenson, women outnumber men at all ages—far more than the million-odd majority of women in the U.S. population can explain. In schizophrenia, the female-male ratio is 3 to 2; in senile psychosis and cerebral arteriosclerosis, 6 to 5; involutional psychosis, 5 to 2; and manic-depressive psychosis, about 2 to 1.