75-3 THE PRINCIPLES OF MENTAL HYGIENE BY WILLIAM A. WHITE, M.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917 All rights reserved 1790 W58 1917 PREFACE For many years a small group of philanthropically minded persons have been fighting the battles of the failures in life and trying to secure for them an adequate understanding which should be the basis for creating a new, a more enlightened, and a constructive and helpful program for dealing with them. Despite the length of time this movement in its various ramifications has been in existence, and the number of people who have been engaged in it, and, too, the high type of many so engaged, there never has issued from its sponsors anything that could properly be called a comprehensive program, an adequate statement of principles scientifically founded and practically workable. The reason for this seems to me clear. These persons had no such program, they had no such principles, their moving force was faith. Many, perhaps all, great movements, are thus shadowed forth in their origins by the faith that is in those who believe in them. It is these pioneers to whom all honour is due, who have had the courage to speak for what they believed was right, for what they had faith in, in the face of opposition and ridicule and even though when asked to state their case they found themselves quite incapable of put 44239 ting into words what they felt. They have stood firm, however, until principles could be formulated and programs projected. When that day arrived the battle was perhaps already won. The battle for mental hygiene has already been won. The far seeing faith of its progenitors felt and knew that a way could always be found to solve any problem that needed to be solved, if only there was the patience to keep on, the determination to succeed. Mental hygiene has come to stay, there is not the shadow of a doubt about that, but its principles remain to be formulated because its activities have been scattered over so many fields which, while not really, still are practically, disconnected. There have been the problems of the care of the insane, prison reform, pauperism, alcoholism, feeble-mindedness, juvenile delinquency, atypical children, vagrancy, prostitution, vocational education, the neuroses and psychoneuroses, drug addiction, social hygiene (venereal prophylaxis), patent medicines and faith cures, and many others, all of which have been recognized by some as being problems that would have to be attacked more or less exclusively by methods founded in the principles of a hygiene of mind. The various directions in which these problems have arisen has tended to a somewhat mutual exclusiveness so that each group was interested only in some particular aspect of the larger problem. The whole field has, therefore, not as yet been comprehensively surveyed. To do this in an at all ade |