MENTAL HYGIENE. Hygiene has ally been conceived of as a system of measures for the creation of conditions without for the maintenance of the bodily health. Mental hygiene is an effort to create favorable comb tions within which will make for mental healtk Whereas hygiene heretofore has dealt wit!. external conditions which are favorable *o health, such as fresh air, sunshine, pure food, exercise, etc., mental hygiene deals with the principles of right living as they apply to the regulation of -our thoughts, our feelings, our activities. In its practical applications mental hygiene attempts to deal with the problem pre sented by the tremendous demands of our fundamental instincts for adequate expression It sees in human failures inability to harness these instincts, while in success it sees them adequately expressed in activities that are at once creative and socially acceptable and valuable. The principles of mental hygiene re ceive their formulation as a result of an under standing of the development of the human mind from earliest infancy to adulthood expressed in terms of a constant interplay and compromise between instinctive desires and social repres sions. These principles will receive their ap plication along two main lines of One by applying them to the scheme of educa tion, modifying it and minimizing the seyerin of these conflicts, and secondly, in individual instances by an examination of the particular situations under which difficulties have pro duced disturbing symptoms in the individual.
As soon as the difficulties of the individual are seen as evidences of his endeavor to make his particular instinct-constellation fit in with the social requirements, it is seen that a vast amount of convention, particularly the criminal law, is the reaction of society against instinc tive manifestions by an effort at forcible re pression, and just as education would not be complete if it stopped wholly at efforts of re pression just so mental hygiene points out that society's methods of dealing with its delinquents are not complete when measures of repression. censure and condemnation alone are used. As in dealing with the child it is necessary to search for and help to develop all the positive characters of value, so in 'dealing with the de linquent it should be society's effort to search for and develop to their fullest extent all those strivings for better things which no one is with out.
This new point of view is applicable to every relation which involves the individual and so ciety, and its ideal must be to bring about a state of understanding rather than a blind clash ing of instincts between these two. When this is done individual instinctive indulgence,. in stead of being met by blind social condemns'. tion, will be met by an intelligent vision which sees the indulgence as a relatively infantile, undeveloped type of reaction and which sets about to bring to pass a different reaction formula by methods of repression where neces sary and to the extent necessary carefully checked by adequate controls but which does not neglect those educational procedures with out which no repression is safe.
The practical application of the principles of mental hygiene must come about as a result of a more complete understanding of the de velopmental stages of the human individual and this means specifically a more complete under standing of the development of the child. This is the "century of the child') and in many ways the advances that have been made in child study point the way toward an adequate hygiene of mind. This is so because in all of the defective and delinquent conditions, as we find them either in children or adults, we see evidences of defective psychological development either gross or in detail. In other. words, the adult delinquent, or the mentally ill adult, presents distinct evidences of having been. arrested at some point in his psychological development, so that in that portion of his behavior which is circumscribed by this limitation there are the outward appearances of infantilism or childish ness. The moods, the grouches, the irritabili ties, the petty dishonesties, lying and pilfering, the subtle cruelties and deceptions, selfishness, over-conscientiousness, prudery, emotionalism and a thousand other traits of character are all the better understood when they are seen to be childish types of reaction, and are almost im mediately appreciated as such as soon as the analogy is suggested.