MENTAL HEALTH AND SICKNESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 944, 13 September 1957, Page 11

MENTAL HEALTH AND SICKNESS

Sir.-"Another of Them" assumes firstly that I am strongly opposed to his colleague’s views and that that is why I am criticising his type of argument, and secondly, that I am completely ignorant of current theories on personality formation. He is justified in neither of these assumptions. I have not expressed my views on child-rear-ing. I criticised his arguments, not necessarily his conclusions. I know enough about the factors which contribute to the formation of any personality, whether considered healthy by the medical psychologist or not, to know that they are many, comp/icated and not fully understood or agreed upon by the experts and that not the least among them is the individual heredity of the person involved. In half an hour of talking around the subiect I think "Medical Psychologist" should have said something of this nature instead

of oversimplifying the whole problem. Mothers must have been left with the impression that their children’s mental health depends entirely on’ how they tackle feeding schedules and toilet training. His TB argument does not parallel the mental health one. Assuming the conventional view of causation, the tubercle bacilli are the necessary cause of overt TB, ie., no bacilli no TB, but one cannot say that a person who has not had a permissive childhood will not develop mental health. In fact, to quote from C..W. Valentine, "Most of the brothers and sisters of young delinquents are not themselves delinquent." And again, "The majority of children from broken homes do not become problem children." "Adaption to life as it is,’ begs the philosophical question, "What is life?" How can you say what is "adequate adaption to life as it is" if you don’t know what life is? If you believe that life is a dog eat dog affair, getting along with one’s fellow human beings hasn’t much to do with adequate adaption. Actually "getting along with one’s fellow human beings" is just the sort of unscientific phraseology which I have been condemning. Studies of "whole populations" are done via reliable samples, as "Another of Them" well knows. Of course, they take considerable time and effort, but they are nevertheless being done all the time by conscientious psychologists who believe in testing their hypotheses before inflictine them on the public.

BARBARA

BREWER

(Raumati South).