Medicine: Mental Health

Ten state governors were among the 300 officials, psychiatrists and welfare workers who sat down in Detroit last week for a two-day conference on the growing problem of mental illness. When it was over, Psychiatrist Karl Menninger summed up: "Nothing new has come out of this conference. But the significant thing is that the governors are now telling the psychiatrists what the psychiatrists have been telling them for 20 years. If they can now go home and convince their legislatures, the people will respond."

Main item in a broad program for which the agreeing governors and psychiatrists will need legislative support: supplying qualified personnel (doctors, nurses and trained attendants) in such numbers that vigorous and more effective treatment can begin as soon as a patient is admitted to a hospital, or (preferably) in time to prevent the need for admission. Another item was stepped-up research, but Tennessee's Governor Frank G. Clement contended with good reason that present knowledge is not being put to use. As he phrased it: "If we knew as much about the cure of cancer as we do about that of mental illness, there would be a medical revolution overnight."