Will Every One Go Insane? by B.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U. S. A. · Jul 8, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 26.

Will Every One Go Insane?

By B.

According to reports made at the recent International Congress of Mental Hygiene, held at Washington, D. C., the rate of insanity is going up very rapidly. Fifty years ago there were only 63 mental cases for every 100,000 of our population. Now there are more than 600 insane among every 100,000 people. If the present rate should keep up, in three hundred years every person in the United States would be insane!

In seeking to fathom the causes of this alarming state of affairs, the experts tell us that heredity is a decided factor in this increase, but that our rushing, jangling civilization also plays a great part in nervous breakdown. Insanity comes “through the speed, congestion, and tense competition of our modern life. Too much hurry. Too much worry. Too many sights and sounds and impressions pressing on our eyes and ears, our brain and nerve centers. You don’t have to be born crazy. You can get that way.” Crowded into cities, working under high pressure, living in jammed-up apartments, trying to maintain an economic pace that calls for more and more luxuries and extravagances, ceaselessly roaming about in search of new sensations and thrills,—these impair the nerves by wearing them out.

All this is not God’s way. He never intended men to congregate in cities: He planned for them a quiet life, working in and surrounded by the beauties of the garden, the fields, the hills, the streams. Such an environment provides its own medicine for mind and body. And God must take us back to that original plan before all the world goes stark mad. B.