psychiatry must, I
fear, be frankly admitted.[5] But dare we blame these practitioners for
their ignorance of, apathy regarding, and even antipathy to, the psychic
and especially the psychotic manifestations of their patients? Ought we
not rather to try to understand the reasons for this ignorance, this
apathy, and this aversion, all three of which seem astonishing to many
of our well-trained psychologists and psychopathologists? Are there not
definite conditions that explain and at least partially excuse the
defects in knowledge and interest and the errors in attitude manifested
by those whom we would be glad to see cognizant and enthusiastically
participant? Psychiatrists, who have taught us to understand and rescue
various types of "sinners" and "social offenders" will, I feel sure,
avoid any moralistic attitude when discussing the shortcomings of their
brethren in the general medical profession, and will, instead, seek to
discover and to remove their causes.

As an internist who values highly the gifts that modern psychology and
psychiatry have been making to medicine, I have given some thought to
the conditions and causes that may be responsible for these professional
delinquencies that you deplore. Though this is not the time nor the
place fully to discuss them, the mere mention of some of the causes and
conditions will, perhaps, contribute to comprehension and pardon, and
may serve to stimulate us all to livelier corrective activity. Let me
enumerate some of them:

(1) A social stigma still attaches, despite all our efforts to abolish
it, to mental disorders and has, to a certain extent, been transferred
to those that study and treat patients manifesting these disorders.

(2) The organization of our general education is very defective since it
fails to make clear to each student man's place in the universe and any
orderly view of the world and man; it fails adequately to enlighten the
student regarding the processes of life as adaptations of organisms to
their environment, man, himself, being such an organism reacting
physically and psychically to his surroundings in ways either favorable
or unfavorable to his own preservation and that of his species; it fails
to teach the student that the human organism represents a bundle of
instincts each with its knowing, its feeling, and its striving
component, that what we call "knowledge" and what we call "character"
are gradual developments in each person, and that if