How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

sweat at a job from morning to night, all the years of one’s life, for the dubious pleasure of being able to afford day and night nurses at an institution for mental diseases. The whole trend of modern medicine is toward pre¬ vention rather than the cure of diseases, and in no medical speciality is the emphasis on prophylaxis more marked than in mental hygiene. The purpose of this book is to help those who have launched a false attack on life’s problems to take mental stock of themselves, and to help them to modify their plan of attack before it is too late. While psychiatry offers definite hopes to those who have fought, not wisely, but too successfully, on a single sector of life, only to find the victory not only empty but painful, the number of human failures as a result of this misdirection of energies is out of all proportion to the number of available psychiatrists. Because of this fact, the problem of the care of the neurotic and the insane has become more a problem of housing and administration than of cure and correction. The intelligent adult will not wait until he has had a mental breakdown or a psychotic episode before taking- mental stock of his style of life, any more than he will wait until he is coughing up pieces of lung, or physically unable to walk upstairs, before consulting a physician. The major obstacles to the treatment of high-pressure go-getting, super-business men of this type is their stubbornness and egoism. They are so intensely involved in the mad pursuit of power that they cannot brook correction or the imputation that their goals are false and their success hollow. If you tell a high-powered business manager that his pattern is fast leading him to an asylum, he will laugh at you. “ Look at my fine organiza¬ tion ! ” he will tell you. “ Is there anything insane about that ? ” The intoxication of partial success distorts his perspectives, and the hashish of ambition develops a dangerous sense of well-being in his mind that dulls the danger signals nature has placed along the way. So much for the successful “ go-getter ”, A more common but equally interesting aspect of this tragic