Troubles Are Legion
Students have been quick to take advantage of this unusual opportunity for consultation. The problems they bring run the whole gamut of mental and emotional woes. Perhaps a boy has been "studying all the time," yet, because he worked inefficiently, has been doing poor work. Perhaps there have been sleepless nights that resulted in bad temper, indigestion and poor marks. Money troubles, obscure fears, estrangement between parents, tangled love affairs, black depressions, all of these and many more are laid before the psychiatrist in his capacity of consulting physician.
A dean's office is an extremely busy place, and a student can, as a rule, have only a few minutes. The doctor, on the other hand, allows any time up to two hours for a consultation. He does little talking and much listening, and he is not a disciplinarian. Any chaplain is obliged by training and conscience to preach moral warnings. The doctor's only duty is to discover causes, and by the discovery of these causes to find their cure. He cannot be shocked by delinquencies nor can he waste time in indignation.
The pioneer in this effort to treat the mental and emotional ills of students is said to have been Dr. Stewart Paton of Princeton, author of a celebrated book, "Human Behavior." An able psychiatrist, he realized the students' need of expert advice and offered his services as consultant.
Dr. Milton Harrington of Dartmouth, consulting psychiatrist and lecturer in mental hygiene, believes with Dr. Paton that the social value of the work is even more important than its individual aspect. He is interested in men as prospective members of society, and feels that psychiatry can render a great service in teaching men to order their lives and their living; to work consciously for the kind of a society they want to live in.
His work at Dartmouth is done as part of a "personnel" organization. Begun by Professor Bancroft, it was carried on by Dr. Husbandt, who spent the war period in the personnel department of the army, and was so impressed by certain of its features that he took them back to the campus. Here, too, as at Yale and Brown. Dr. Arthur Ruggles was called in to organize the psychiatric end of the work.
Practical Help Given
The personnel work is educational, vocational, mental and physical. Freshmen are helped over that terrible first home-sickness; are encouraged in scholastic plans and athletic aspirations. A check is kept on their health.
When students reach the dignity of juniors the committee's Chairman, Professor Harry Wellman, who is also Professor of Marketing in the Tuck School of Business, helps them and Summer work in line with what they look toward as a vocation. When they attain the heights of seniordom they consult him about that vitally important first job, to be sought after graduation.
The Department of Psychology and the psychiatrist are working together, the one to find out how student minds work, the other to apply that knowledge so that sick mind may be healed and taught to work in the most effective way.
Intelligence Tests Common
The psychological research that must necessarily lie behind the practice of psychiatry is going on in some form in almost all the colleges of the country. Use of intelligence tests calculated to get at a student's mental content has spread with astonishing rapidity. Originated by the famous Frenchman. Binet, they were brought to this country by Dr. H. H. Goddard. Until the war, knowledge of them was chiefly confined to experimental psychologists. Then the famous Army Alpha tests were devised, and intelligence testing took on the appearance of a popular sport.
At Dartmouth freshmen have an intelligence test within the first week or so of their arrival. Then as the term goes on scholastic marks are compared with the percentages indicated by the test. If a man whose test indicated that he belonged in the brightest 10 per cent., of the class gets marks that rank him in the dullest 10 per cent., he becomes an object of study.
It may be bad health, too many outside activities, complicated worries or half a dozen other causes. He is sent to a physician of body or of mind to be straightened out. On the other hand, if a man who tests low receives top marks in his examinations, the test and the course are scrutinized with equal care.
Another type of psychological research is to be instituted at Harvard University next fall with the creation of a new chair of abnormal and dynamic psychology. Dr. Morten Prince has been called from his private practice to take charges. He is the pioneer in psychopathology in the United States.
Dr. Prince is now a man of 70. His early professional years were devoted to philosophy and to the practice of medicine. He made important research in obscure nervous diseases before he became known as a psychologist, and is perhaps most famous for his researches in problems of multiple personality. His theories of the subconscious were well known among psychologists long before Freud's had become a familiar name in this country. Dr. Prince has been guest professor in many American universities. In Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh and London he has lectured on phases of abnormal psychology.
To Study Personality
His interests lie in the "why" of human behavior; in the forces within the personality that determine its actions. The new chair of dynamic and abnormal psychology which he will occupy is not to concern itself with the material of what is ordinarily considered academic psychology--sensations, perceptions, associations, the static mechanism of a mind--but rather with what might be called "purposive" psychology, human behavior and its driving forces.
It is through study of the abnormal that one gets a clearer knowledge of the normal. And men who teach well minds how to care for themselves must know what happens when they don't