mental hygiene

[′men·təl ′hī‚jēn]

(psychology)

That branch of hygiene dealing with the preservation of mental and emotional health.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Mental Hygiene

a branch of hygiene that studies measures and means for creating, protecting, and strengthening mental health and preventing mental diseases. The theoretical foundation of mental hygiene includes social and general psychology, psychotherapy, social psychiatry, and the physiology of higher nervous activity.

Galen wrote the first specialized work on mental hygiene— Hygiene of Passions, or Moral Hygiene. The idea that mental health depends on social life was proposed by P. J. G. Cabanis. I. P. Merzheevskii, the founder of mental hygiene in Russia, regarded the high aspirations and the interests of the individual as the most important means of protecting mental health and increasing productive activity.

In the USSR, mental hygiene emphasizes social measures such as improvement of working and living conditions; the systematic inculcation of active, socially valuable attitudes in adolescents; and vocational guidance to promote the practical application of these attitudes. In addition, mental hygiene in the USSR emphasizes an educational approach and the teaching of specific methods of controlling one’s mental condition and sense of self. Observation of patients with nervous and mental disorders in dispensaries is an important method in mental hygiene.

The most pressing tasks of mental hygiene include the prevention of mental traumas in children and the development of methods of increasing the effectiveness of teaching in secondary and higher schools, in order to prevent excessive nervous and psychological stress.

The consequences of the scientific and technological revolution are increasing the importance of controlling the psychological climate in small and large groups and of finding ways to increase the mental stability of workers performing increasingly complex jobs. The branches of mental hygiene include industrial mental hygiene (the mental hygiene of work), as well as the mental hygiene of mental labor, sexuality and family relations, children and adolescents, and the elderly.

REFERENCES

Kerbikov, O. V. Izbr. trudy. Moscow, 1971. Pages 300–11.
Opsikhogigienicheskoi rabote v shkole: Metodicheskoe pis’mo. Moscow, 1961.
Carroll, H. A. Mental Hygiene, 3rd ed. New York, 1956.
Stevenson, G. S. Mental Health Planning for Social Action. New York-Toronto-London, 1956.
English, O. S., and G. H. J. Pearson. Emotional Problems of Living: A voiding the Neurotic Pattern, 3rd ed. New York, 1963.

V. E. ROZHNOV

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References in periodicals archive

This meant that there were two important differences between psychoanalysis and mental hygiene. First, hygienists took for granted the naturalness of children's interests rather than attempting to "shed light on the desires behind those interests, how they were shaped, and how they might be over-determined by unconscious forces" (Taubman 2012, 85).

The tension between Beers and Meyer shaped the nascent mental hygiene movement.

Like Meyer, Salmon was concerned with adult maladjustment and conducted a number of child studies attempting to discover its etiology; unlike Meyer, however, Salmon was not opposed to making mental hygiene a public issue.

Eliot's reply, however, solidified the mental hygiene movement's new medical focus as well as the Rockefeller Foundation's unwavering support of Salmon and his scientific initiatives.

In doing so, Salmon provided the impetus for implementing mental hygiene regimens in America's public schools.

What resulted from Salmon's proposal was the Program for the Prevention of Delinquency, which "launched the child guidance movement, greatly stimulated the school social work or visiting teacher movement as well as the development of child psychiatry and psychiatric social work and became the spearpoint for mental hygiene penetration of the school" (Cohen 1983, 128).

The inability to predict psychic phenomena ran counter to the mental hygiene movement's teleological understanding of the human condition, which explains why hygienists remained skeptical of the emancipatory project of psychoanalysis and why they misappropriated psychoanalytic thought toward therapeutic ends--a misappropriation evident in how hygienists thought about the topic of Freud's fourth lecture, childhood sexuality.

This recognition is lacking both theoretically and practically in the mental hygiene movement, as is recognition of the paradoxical nature of transference--it is both created and destroyed through analysis.

In analyzing the lessons missed by both mental hygienists and historians of the movement, this paper has explored the history of the mental hygiene movement with a view toward the emancipatory project of psychoanalysis.

"A Society for Mental Hygiene as an Agency for Social Service and Education," Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene 3: 1-16.

Etiology replaces interminability: a historiographical analysis of the mental hygiene movement