Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1876 — Modern Insanity. [ARTICLE]

Modern Insanity.

The letter of our Boston correspondent cals attention to a form of insanity so marked as to receive a special designation as the New England type. It is Characterized by intensity. It is recognized by its acute nervous excitement and a tendency to self-destruction. There is more brain activity in it than in ordinary forms of derangement. Some of the French reports show a growing tendency in the same direction in that country, and perhaps it is one of the results of modern life, which is so largely mental and sympathetic in its characteristics. An intellectual people, living at a period of remarkable intellectual activity and excitement, taking recreation of an intellectual form from the theater and novel and lyceum, will naturally break down at the point where the greatest strain comes. And the point to be specially guarded against in our systems of education and life habits is the too violent or continuous tensions of the intellect, either in study, business, politics or social excitements. The muscular side of life, the sentimental side of human nature, should have an ampler provision and receive more attention than we have made for them. The brain must be balanced by biceps, and the exercise of the heart is more important for health and happiness than the undue exercise of the intellect in any direction. Statistics show that insanity is rapidly increasing in modern life, and perhaps the specific form ft is taking in Massachusetts indicates the principal cause of its in-, crease. It is sad to think that a small State like Massachusetts has 4.000 insane people in it. At the modern English rate of valuation these insane people represent a total of $7,500,b00; and when the buildings now in process of erection for their treatment are completed they will represent a cost of $3,500,000. But such mathematical calculations of cost and care provoke rather than satisfy. We scorn all such financial estimates of the

value of man or weman. Who can teß the worth of a father to a family depend. ,ent on hia support aud oversight ? What figures can represent the value of a mother to her little ones, or a devoted wife to her husband, or a beautiful and brilliant daughter just unfolding into womanhood! The preventives of insanity in modern life do not begin to receive the attention they deserve. Every fetv months the community is startled by some fresh statement of inhumanity to the patients of Insane asylums. In some instances these complaints are well founded, and each new outrage on this class of helpless dependents elicits.an outburst of publie indignation. But what is. far better for society at large than any rhetorical indignation or sentimental sympathy is the increasing attention the ablest physicians in this country and Europe are giving to every form of mental derangement, and the light they are throwing on the proper treatment of all diseases of the mind. It is acheeriqg fact that about all that has been done to alleviate the condition of this unfortunate class of sufferers, and eventually restore them to themselves again, has been accomplished within the recollection of living physicians. Whathas been done for the insane within fifty years, when they were caged as wild beasts and chained in outhouses and immured in dungeons, encourages the hope that it will eventually be ranked as one of the generally curable disorders of the human system. But to reduce the insanity in modem society to the lowest possible point is a far more difficult yet far more important undertaking — N. Y. Graphic.