BERNE

Leo Jansen had the misfortune to cut his foot in the woods last Friday. He cut through the nail on one toe and severed an artery. Dr. Stott was called. It is necessary to take six stitches in the wound.
 

FULLERS

Dandelions are still in bloom and may be picked almost any day.

PUBLIC HEALTH HINTS

Causes of Mental Disease — Prepared for This Newspaper by the New York State Department of Health

On Oct. 1, 1914, there were 35,485 persons suffering from mental disease in the public and private hospitals of New York State.

The aggregate annual cost of caring for these persons is over ten million dollars, without counting their withdrawal from productive life. A large part of this mental disease is preventable, and its control is one of the most important problems of the state.

Happiness and success in life require a constant adjustment of our activities to correspond with the world of things and men about us. In mental disease this adjustment is lacking in greater or less degree.

A considerable proportion of mental disease is undoubtedly due to hereditary causes. Recent studies in Massachusetts have shown that in certain small rural towns there is five times as much insanity as in other rural towns where the conditions of life are the same, and this difference is almost certainly due to the presence of family inheritance of insanity in the first group.

Even where there is a family tendency to mental disease, however, mental hygiene or the cultivation of self-control and of an open and cheerful attitude of mind, together with observance of the rules of personal hygiene as to fresh air, food, exercise and rest, will do much to check the development of an abnormal mental state.

Fully half of our mental disease, according to estimates of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, is due to external causes.

Under this heading come physical injuries to the brain, resulting from accidents and blows to the head.

Chemical poisons such as lead poisoning and poisoning due to naphtha and wood alcohol in industries, and particularly to the use of alcohol and other habit-forming drugs, form an important group of causes of mental disease. Dr. T. W. Salmon estimates that “alcohol as a predisposing or as an immediate cause is responsible for more than a third of all admissions to our hospitals for the insane.”

Communicable diseases, particularly those associated with immorality, are estimated to cause about one-fifth of our burden of mental disease.

Finally, malnutrition and overwork, particularly the stress of long continued monotonous labor and the train of worry and anxiety, contribute in a considerable degree to the filling of institutions for the mentally defective and insane.

Fortunately these external causes are largely within our control, and in this fact lies good hope of success in dealing with the problem of mental disease.