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WESTERN CANADIAN LUMBER WORKER

“SEE A PSYCHIATRIST”

“aes The following is an excerpt taken from the speech made by Dr. J. L. Rosenstein to _ the 15th Labour-Management Safety Conference in San Francisco. In this portion of his speech, Doctor Rosenstein puts forward a convincing argument that people should visit

psychiatrists just as freely as they now do with their family doctors.

“Over and over again, men and women have said to me, “Oh, of course, 1 would want a healthy mind, a sound mind”. Well, that’s wonderful and I’m with you. Yet we exercise to keep ourselves in shape, not because we want to be professional athletes. You watch your diet and you see a doctor once a year. You go to a dentist twice a year and scrub your teeth three times a day. And from the time you're born you collect a whole system of principles of physical hygiene related to diet, sanitation, bathing, fresh air, proper clothing and all kinds of other things to keep yourself in good shape.

LITTLE BOY

In late April there is always a

_ Mental Health Week and you see

the papers filled every year with all kinds of stories about how one out of every ten children born this year will wind up in an institution for mental care and will be there for

eleven years and that half of them

will never get out. About one out of every four families is affected. One out of every three marriages goes to pot and not for physical rea- sons you may be sure. Where are these people? They're not in insti- tutions. They are right here in this room. They are in your homes, in your churches, in your schools. They

And then you've got dangerous Dan, the old paranoid man. He's the man who knows that everybody has it in for him. The dirty dog who is his boss is never going to give him a break and he always gets the dirty jobs, the dirty end of the stick. And when he sees a couple of people down the shop talking and looking at him he knows they're talking about him and some day, boy, he’s going to take care of them, Some- times he does. And his mind is not on his job either. He’s always look- ing around wondering where the boss is because he knows he’s spying on him, You know him.

And you've got the great big mass of psychoneurotics. They are your most serious problem, not because any one of them is especially serious — it’s the sheer weight of numbers.

But you say that if you had to choose you would choose a sound mind as more important than a healthy body. So I ask you, do you have a family psychiatrist whom you see once a year or a family psycholo- gist whom you see twice a year. You don’t wait until your teeth are ready to fall out before you see your den- tist. You don’t wait until you are ready for some major medical treat- ment before you go to see a doctor. You talk about preventive care. Do you have to wait until you are ready for a psychiatrist or a straight jacket before you go to see this man?

If you think I’m exaggerating you're wrong. About 12 to 14% of

BLUE WITH BIG

are in your offices and in your shops and in your departments. They are your subordinates. They are your superiors. They are your fellow workmen. They are in you and around you if you’re normal—that’s where they are.

And you can’t shrug your should- ers and say, “I’m no psychiatrist, I’m not going to start fooling around with that stuff”, because the fact re- mains that whether you want to or not you are already living with and adjusting and dealing with the emo- tional maladjustment problems of the people you are around twenty-four hours a day on and off the job. Sure you know them. You know the

DANGEROUS DAN, THE OLD PARANOID MAN

They are emotionally immature. They want to be babied and get special attention. They want to be pampered and if they don’t get it they feel neglected and they gripe about their boss and about their job. They quit, then they come back and then they quit again and they come back because they have learned a lesson and you take them back be- cause you need them and then they quit again. And because life is dull, they try to enliven it with a little bit of gossip or a little bit of scandle, either to report it or get in- volved in it, and they’re the ones who call you up at three o’clock in the morning on a Sunday to get them out of the jail house so they can go to work. They always seem to have domestic problems, family problems, wife problems, all kinds of problems.

the boys who were drafted for the Second World War were rejected be- cause they were emotionally incapa- ble of adjusting. Between 30 and 40% of the boys who were dis- charged for medical reasons from all the services were Section 8 boys— psychos. I don’t know what the figure is up in your section of Cali- fornia, Oregon or Washington, but your own doctors will tell you whether it is 90, 80, 70 or 60%. That more than half the people who come to their offices complaining of physical aches and pains don’t have a thing wrong with them physically. They are emotionally ill. The dis- order is psychogenic.

PROBLEMS

hypomaniac, the hotshot. You know him. Overactive, overenthusiastic, overimpulsive. He’s over everything. He knows exactly how everything should be done. The trouble is that you won't listen. He takes chances just for the hell of it—compulsive, constantly on the go. A real fire- ball.

At the other extreme we have little boy Blue. To him life is real, life is sad, and life is earnest. He doesn’t have problems. Life is just one great big problem, Good God you never know what can happen once you get up. If fact, just living is a great big threat to this man. People can die from it. They have.

Well, you've got those people who are constantly arguing—any side, either side—doesn’t make any dif- ference, this way or that way, give you first choice. They'll argue about anything. You've got those that keep stalling constantly—they don’t say

“I’m a staller.” They say that you can’t just jump into things. You’ve got to kick things around. You've got people who keep putting off deci- sions, who agree with you one min- ute and disagree with you the next minute. You've got people who are “yes” men constantly or “no” men constantly. These are emotionally disturbed people. You've got people with all kinds of prejudices, the rockheads, the blowhards, pegple with a built in grudge, against any- body and everybody.

PEOPLE LOADED WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

Maybe you don’t want to be a agen but that’s just too bad. You are dealing with these people loaded with psychological problems whether you want to or not. You

are dealing with emotional sickness too and Dr John Schindler before he

versity at the Ochoner Clinic for stro intestinal disorders they cked 500 patients in sequence. e ailments of 76% of them were sgenic. Yale out-patient clinic their figure was 74%. Emo- ly induced disturbances and arent rare. They show

in all kinds of behaviour

patterns as well as fashion.

You know these physical mani- festations. When you've got a lump in your throat, brother you’re way down low. You know that’s emo- tional. So is the pain right here in the back of the neck; gall bladder like pains, at least 50% of those are emotional, so are ulcer like pains. Dizzy spells 80% of these are psy- chological. Headaches, 80% of those are emotional. Constipation, 70% or more is emotional, Tiredness, at least 90% is. Talk about limitation of performance. Do you get tired at exactly the same time in the same place every day? There are tablets

in physical

who is always pushing, pushing, winds up with a coronary.

J man who is angry?

gry at the world,

though he is

never for-

born with

advertised on TV all the time — which fizz when you put them in water and are supposed to take care of gas. The fact is that gas is 99% psychological,

Talk about the psychosomatics of frustration. Under stress of excessive anxiety. and continued apprehension and pressures and a sense of futility the body does produce adrenalin for action and it does produce excessive gastric juices. This is psychosomatic. And these excessive adrenalin and gastric juices have nothing to work on and too much of the gastric juices lead to ulcer, just as too many stopped up noses lead to sinus in- fection. :

out which is the natural and proper direction or it has to be turned in. It can only go in one of these direc- tions, but we have controls, and our laws clobber us when we get too much aggression expressed outward- ly. And these disapproved agegres- sions have no place to go and are turned in on ourselves.

An aggression then, when we can’t attack, turns inward. We can’t beat our wives anymore; we can't attack our landlord; or the tax man or the boss so this aggression is turned in-

STOP IT

Shut down your machine

Wait untill it stops Tag or Lock the control

BEFORE

CLEANING CLEARING OILING ADJUSTING

BRITISH COLUMBIA WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION BOARD

EMOTION —A BLANK STATE

On the job our major concern isn’t with the extreme emotions, the psy- chotics, the acute neurotics. Our ma- jor concern on the job is with the common everyday emotional disturb- ances which are in effect as incapaci- tating and upsetting as physical ill- nesses, about which we make such a great big to do. The psychologist thinks of an emotion as a mentally blank state and the degree of blank- ness is dependent on the violence of the emotion; the biologist also says that when we talk about the human animal the closest we come to animal is under stress of emotion; and the psysiologist says that a true emotion is a visceral experience.

When we say “I love you with all my heart,” it’s more romantic than saying, “I love you with all my heart and liver and kidneys and all the contents of my guts.” But it is closer to the whole truth to say the latter. We are a physical thing, not a men- tally capable thing under stress of emotion. We are mentally blank. Take a quick look around your own

_ department. Examine your own or-

ganization. How much limitation of performance and how much accident proneness is the result of gnawing anxiety or depression where the man has his mind on what'’s eating at his guts. How many accidents are the re- sult of ill concealed feelings of hate, fear or worry?

PSYCHIATRIST

Please Jet me tell you of Dr. Sid- ney Portis who never saw a patient who was not referred by another doctor. The doctor would say to you “you go and see Dr. Portis, he is a great internist and you need internal medicine.” When you got up to Sid- ney Portis’ office you might have to spend two or three days or a week going through the ropes of labora- tory, testing, etc. and then finally you wound up in front of Sidney Portis with all these reports and he would in 99% of the cases take no more than five minutes—that’s all.

Here and there some people would

mat oh...

them he would say “Your doctor sent you here because he feels you need internal medical care and I’m an internist and I am going to take care of your internals.” However, there is something I want you to do first. Here is a list of psychiatrists. You can choose any one of them. First we must clean out your emo- tional household. Then we will take care of your internals,”

Do you know what happened? Most of those people never came back because by the time they had cleaned out their emotional house-

“hold they didn’t need internal medi-

cine.”