PSYCHIATRY IN INDUSTRY

I. Industrial management is open-minded about the application of psychiatry in industry provided the psychiatrist is willing to learn about industry and its problems. In our own experience, we find that top management increasingly asks for psychiatric help in personnel problems. This, in time, will result in improved mental health throughout the entire organization, if our advice is sound. This—the top—is the place preventive psychiatry must start to be effective.

II. It seems obvious that the basic causes of all functional mental disease exist, grow and cause some manifestations in normal people; that normal people are the hosts or carriers from whom unfortunate individuals contract the more serious, recognized forms of this group of ills. Until we learn far more than we now know about this part of the cycle, we cannot hope to learn how to treat and prevent mental disease. Industry offers the psychiatrist an unique opportunity to explore this important area, now one of almost complete darkness.

III. We have already developed a psychotherapeutic approach with which, in several hundred cases of psychoneuroses and a few psychoses, it is possible to obtain lasting good results with a very few interviews while the patients continue at their regular work.