SICK MINDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 483, 24 September 1948, Page 16

SICK MINDS

INSIDE THE ASYLUM. By John Vincent. Introduction by Vera Brittain. Allen & Unwin.

HIS is an absorbing, sorrowful, but not altogether depressing account of a man who sank deeper and deeper into mental misery until he found himself in a mental hospital. There he was fortunate enough to come under a superintendent who understood, who had sympathy, and who had psychiatrists on his staff to work on such cases, and the result was a cure within a few months. But that of course gives no impression at all either of the sickness or of the cure. The sickness began in childhood, and was the result partly of a bad heredity afd partly of an unsatisfactory family environment. . Adolescence of course complicated it, and there was further strain in the fact that the author was poor, and indifferently educated (though he had marked ability), and found it difficult to maintain himself. But the culminating crises were impotence when he married and a conscientious objection to killing when war came. The second trouble exposed him to contempt and ill-will, and the first, when he occasionally found enough courage to consult doctors about it, was brushed aside as of no importance. But it is only in his last chaptet but one that he reaches the. mental hospital, and he is out again before the last chapter. To that extent ;

the book is misnamed, since its real theme is the steady drift down-hill before the hospital doors open. Life in hospital is grim enough, but not nearly so depressing as the long series of failures outside, and the rebuffs when he turns for sympathy and help. In the opinion of Vera Brittain, who writes a long introduction, this book is "part of the accumulating. evidence which shows that, in the field of mental science, this scientific age remains primitive, barbarous, and abysmally ignorant." It is difficult not to agree with that, but equally difficult not to resent Vera Brittain’s use of the introductory pages for propaganda against war. War was one of the breaking strains in Vincent’s case only because he was a very sick man when it overtook him. He appealed for and was given farm work, and while it is deplorable that personal insult should have been added, the fact that he was often called "a bloody conchie" as he passed people would not send a healthy man to hospital. But if he is never robust in body or in mind he has a sensitive and clear mind, and a considerable gift of expression with his pen. Some readers will recognise a part of the story as something they had already read in the New Statesman.