HE SANE SOCIETY
everybody? Certainly, if an individual acted in this fashion, ser-
ious doubts would be raised as to his sanity; should he, however,
claim that there is nothing wrong, and that he is acting perfectly
reasonably, then the diagnosis would not even be doubtful any
more.
Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain
the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They
hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of
the number of "unadjusted" individuals, and not that of a pos-
sible unadjustment of the culture itself. This book deals with the
latter problem; not with individual pathology, but with the path-
ology of normalcy, particularly with the pathology of contemporary
Western society. But before entering into the intricate discussion
of the concept of social pathology, let us look at some data,
revealing and suggestive in themselves, which make reference to
the incidence of individual pathology in Western culture.
What is the incidence of mental illness in the various coun-
tries of the Western world? It is a most amazing fact that there
are no data which answer this question. While there are exact
comparative statistical data on material resources, employment,
birth and death rates, there is no adequate information about
mental illness. At the most we have some exact data for a number
of countries, like the United States and Sweden, but they only
refer to admissions of patients to mental institutions, and they
are not helpful in making estimates of comparative frequency of
mental illness. These figures tell us just as much about improved
psychiatric care and institutional facilities as they tell us about
increase in incidence of mental illness.' The fact that more than
half of all hospital beds in the United States are used for mental
patients on whom we spend an annual sum of over a billion
dollars may not be an indication of any increase in mental
2 cf. H. Goldhamer and A. Marshall, Psychosis and Civilization, Free Press, Glencoe,