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From International Socialism, No.26, Autumn 1966, p.37.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Mental Health in a Changing World
Kenneth Soddy and Robert H. Ahrenfeldt (eds.)
Tavistock, 35s.
This is the first and probably the least exciting of three volumes which are being produced on the basis of the discussions of an International Study Group of the World Federation of Mental Health in 1961. It is mainly devoted to reviewing changes in mental health work in various countries, and the mental health implications of various contemporary phenomena such as prejudice and discrimination, rapid economic and cultural change, attitudes towards world citizenship, aggression and war. It abounds in common, ie not startling, sense of the kind that there are ‘acute dangers attending the attainment of positions of responsibility and power in this connexion (nuclear armaments) by people with paranoid personality tendencies,’ that ‘rapid cultural change may not necessarily and automatically constitute a stress situation,’ that the value of breast-feeding should be emphasised with due regard to local conditions since ‘the anxiety that is commonly felt by the mother whose infant does not thrive on her breast has caused many mental health problems among the more responsibly-minded mothers.’ One is reassured to learn that ‘it is not a mental health objective that the poet, the protester and the creative artist should disappear.’ One good feature of all three volumes is the sixty-page bibliography on mental health in part three; although sections of this show a certain weakness – e.g., the one on population and mental health has only five titles of which two deal specifically with the Mauritius and one is pure endocrinology – in general it could be useful.
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Last updated on 14.12.2007