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Show Physical Causes of Mental Ills I By Gaorga S. Stevenson. M. D.. Medical Consultant National Association for Mental Health Perhaps the question about mental illness that is asked more often than any other is: What is mental illness?" ill-ness?" Actually, the question should be asked this way; "What are mental illnesses?" because there are more than a hundred different kinds of mental illnesses. They range from mild to severe, they occur at any time of life from Infancy to old age, then affect both men and women and rich and poor alike. ' Some of the serious mental Illnesses have physical cause such as those resulting from a brain injury, from severe alcoholism, from poisonous chemicals or from damage dam-age to the brain caused by advanced syphilis. Many other patients now in mental hospitals are suffering from mental men-tal illness due to bodily changes, such as cerebral arteriosclerosis arterio-sclerosis and senile psychosis, which! occur in the later years of life. There there are mental illnesses for which there Is no known" physical cause. They are called the "functional psychoses." Among these are the manic-depressive psychoses, psy-choses, the involuntary phychosis, and Schizophrenia. Of course, it may turn out, when we have done more research, that there is some psysical basis for these illnesses too. Schizophrenia is the most common of all the serious mental illnesses. It accounts for half of all the patients now in mental hospitals. Because it strikes early in life it is called the "psychosis of youth." In one state, of all children chil-dren and young adults up to the age of 44 who were admitted ad-mitted to mental hospitals for the first time, 56- were suffering from schizophrenia. One thing all serious mental illnesses have in common is that they usually require hospital care and treatment. And generally, the sooner these illnesses are discovered and treated, the better the patients' chance for recovery. This and other Information on mental illness can be found in a leaflet published by the National Association for Mental Men-tal Health called "Some Things You Should Know About Mental and Emotional Illness." You can obtain a free copy by writing the Utah Association for Mental Health, 141 East 2nd South, Salt Lake City, Utah, or telephone DAvis 2-0571. "There is probably no such thing as a purely "mental" illness. All physical illnesses produce some changes in one's emotions and all mental illnesses produce some sort of change in the phy- -e?c! bMa nf th person." Dr. C. H. Hardin Branch. |