YOUR HEALTH: HERE'S HOW
Stafford, Jane
YOUR HEALTH: Here's How By JANE STAFFORD "THE chronic alcoholic is a mentally sick person," Dr. Esther L. Richards, associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, declared...
...The emphasis at this meeting was on the alcoholic person, not on alcoholism alone...
...Gordon B. Myers, of Detroit, report in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association here...
...He is not insane but he cannot help following every impulse that flits across his mind...
...Esther L. Richards, associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, declared at the Institute on Alcoholism held in Baltimore...
...Sometimes the nervousness, psychic depression, inability to concentrate, hot flashes, and other symptoms that characterize the climacteric in men are due not to glandular failure but to a psychoneurotic condition...
...Sometimes, she explained, the alcoholic is what psychiatrists call a constitutional psychopath...
...Sex Hormone Treatment For Mid-Life Cases CHICAGO—A glandular change in mid-life, such as invariably occurs in women, does also occur in man and, as in women, can be treated satisfactorily with the appropriate sex hormone, Dr...
...His weakness is a symptom of poor mental health...
...He cannot be cured and society must insist that he be legally controlled...
...He can be helped if he wants it...
...Myers objective evidence that 23 of 38 patients complaining of the physical and psychic symptoms of the climacteric owed their symptoms to sex gland failure...
...He uses alcohol as he uses crime and sex outrages to express his impulsiveness...
...Disappearance of the symptoms following treatment with the male sex hormone confined the evidence of the laboratory tests...
...The laboratory tests gave Dr...
...Richards declared, "that every case of alcohol addiction must be treated as an individual person, we shall have no progress in combatting these conditions...
...Carl G. Heller, of Vancouver, Wash., and Dr...
...It takes time and patience and a competent doctor to find out why the alcoholic has to lean on something, to build him over so that he will not need a crutch, or to help find a less dangerous crutch than alcohol...
...Such cases are not benefited by sex hormone treatment...
...This Institute was not for patients but for the instruction of doctors, nurses, teachers, clergymen, social workers, probation officers, and others who have to deal with alcoholism...
...The conditions she referred to are not only alcoholism but the crime, the auto accidents, the venereal disease, the illegitimacy which are intimately associated with it...
...Richards continued...
...Heller and Dr...
...It may occur as early as the third decade of life, but probably only a small proportion of men who live into old age are affected...
...Until society gets this idea," Dr...
...More frequently the alcoholic is a person who uses alcohol "as a crutch to lean on to help him through the rough traffic of life," Dr...
...The change, scientifically termed the climacteric, is relatively rare in men, however...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 44
