presence of a person constantly in danger of
being hurt by a chance allusion to an unhappy occurrence.

I have said much about the obligation of the sane in reference to
easing the burdens of those committed to institutions. I might say
almost as much about the attitude of the public toward those who
survive such a period of exile, restored, but branded with a suspicion
which only time can efface. Though a former patient receives personal
consideration, he finds it difficult to obtain employment. No
fair-minded man can find fault with this condition of affairs, for an
inherent dread of insanity leads to distrust of one who has had a
mental breakdown. Nevertheless, the attitude is mistaken. Perhaps one
reason for this lack of confidence is to be found in the lack of
confidence which a former patient often feels in himself. Confidence
begets confidence, and those men and women who survive mental illness
should attack their problem as though their absence had been occasioned
by any one of the many circumstances which may interrupt the career of
a person whose mind has never been other than sound. I can testify to
the efficacy of this course, for it is the one I pursued. And I think
that I have thus far met with as great a degree of success as I might
have reasonably expected had my career never been all but fatally
interrupted.

Discharged from the State Hospital in September, 1903, late in October
of that same year I went to New York. Primarily my purpose was to study
art. I even went so far as to gather information regarding the several
schools; and had not my artistic ambition taken wing, I might have
worked for recognition in a field where so many strive in vain. But my
business instinct, revivified by the commercially surcharged atmosphere
of New York, soon gained sway, and within three months I had secured a
position with the same firm for which I had worked when I first went to
New York six years earlier. It was by the merest chance that I made
this most fortunate business connection. By no stretch of my rather
elastic imagination can I even now picture a situation that would, at
one and the same time, have so perfectly afforded a means of
livelihood, leisure in which to indulge my longing to write the story
of my experiences, and an opportunity to further my humanitarian
project.

Though persons discharged from mental hospitals are usually able to
secure, without much difficulty, work as unskilled laborers, or