Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1920 — MANY FEEBLE MINDED REJECTED [ARTICLE]

MANY FEEBLE MINDED REJECTED

More than 24,000 candidates for military service in this country during the war were rejected as feebleminded according to a paper written by Dr. Pearce Bailey, chairman of the New York state commission on mental defectives, read at the closing session of the Societies for Mental Hygiene at New York recently. Rejection for nervous and mental diseases, he asserted, ranked fourth on the list. The percentage of mental defectives averaged six to a thousand, and ran especially high among the immigrant classes of New York. Past records showed that 50,000 delinquents might have been expected in the American army but that only 14,000 developed. Persons suffering from functional nervous Dr. Bailey explained, were unable to face trying situations successfully. Scores of persons may be found undergoing treatment for physical troubles in hospitals in normal times, he added when they are sound in every way except their nerves. Persons of another group were found, he said, who showed no pronounced symptoms of nervous or mental disorders, but suffered from instability of a sort that unfitted them for duty as a soldier. This class, he explained, easily became the tools of designing propagandists in spreading seditious doctrines. Dr. Bailey expressed the opinion that one-third of the inmates of penal institutions were nervous or mental defectives. Childhood is the time to teach those problems he declared, and medical schools were neglecting their duty in not providing courses for students of mental hygiene.