In that day, saith the Lord, I will smite every horse with astonishment, and his rider with madness.
—Zechariah 12:4
3374 30% Of World!
A New York scientist, working in the field of mental disorders, reported to a United Nations committee that up to 30% of the world’s population were suffering from some form of mental trouble. In one of the world’s largest cities, a seven-year study by experts showed that four of every five in the city had some kind of mental disturbance. It will be to a world entangled in its perplexities that Antichrist will make an overwhelming appeal.
3375 Number Of Mental Health People
For over the past thirty years, the number of primary mental health personnel has increased from 14,000 to over 100,000. These personnel include psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses.
Some 17 million mentally-ill in the U. S. occupied half the hospital beds in America.
3376 Declining IQ?
Some years ago Dr. Raymond Cattell, a Leonard Darwin research fellow, stated that “speaking in round terms a decline of average I. Q. for town and country of about three points per generation is indicated; or one point per decade. If this were to continue for three hundred years half the population would be mentally defec tive … the present rate of change must be one of the most galloping changes to bankruptcy that has over occurred.”
—Prairie Overcomer
3377 Costly Psycho-Analysis
Recently I read of a person who had had ten thousand hours of psycho-analysis without substantial improvement. At an average of one hour per day five days per week, this person sought help for more than thirty-eight years. At today’s rate of from $25 to $50 per hour, such a person could spend from $250,000 to $500,000.
—Donald Vittner
3378 Sex And Mental Health
Premarital sex relations growing out of the so-called new morality have significantly increased the number of young people in mental hospitals. This was reported by Dr. Francis Braceland, former president of the American Psychiatric Association and currently the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Braceland told the National Methodist Convocation on Medicine and Theology in Rochester, Minnesota, that “a more lenient attitude on campus about premarital sex experience has imposed stresses on some college women severe enough to cause emotional breakdown.”
—Christianity Today
3379 Shooting One Peasant A Day
Many monarchs were so insane they had to be kept in locked and barred rooms. One was Otto, King of Bavaria from 1886 to 1913. His favorite pastime was to open drawers of various pieces of furniture and hold conversations with the spirits which he believed inhabited them.
Otto also felt that he should shoot a peasant every morning, a whim he was able to gratify with the unsuspected aid of his two guards. One would bring him a gun loaded with blanks, while the other would disguise himself and hide in the bushes on the lawn. Upon seeing that Otto was ready and waiting on his customary place at the window, the man would walk into view and drop “dead” when hearing the shot.
3380 The Executioner Went Crazy
Imagine a man muttering in his sleep: “My name is Lang. I am the government executioner. These are my assistants. I am very sorry you must be hanged. You will have a few minutes in which to make a last request.” In that way, talking in his sleep, the government hangman in Austria went out of his head.
Official explanation was that he has a nervous breakdown from overwork. The overwork consisted of the numerous hangings of Socialists and Nazis after the revolutionary outbreaks in Austria. He got thirty-three dollars and fifty cents for a hanging, which he divided with two assistants. The business was lucrative, but it drove him crazy.
Johann Lang was known as Europe’s best-dressed executioner. He always wore formal dress, evening clothes, when officiating at the gallows. He was most formal, with a never-changing ceremony, when he went to a condemned man’s cell. He had a set courteous speech which he later mumbled repeatedly in his haunted dreams:
“My name is Lang. I am the government executioner. These are my assistants. I am very sorry you must be hanged. You will have a few minutes in which to make a last request.”
—Selected
3381 Shepherds, Inc.
Shepherds, Inc., the Regular Baptist agency for the mentally retarded, was raised up by God in 1957 to help meet this unique challenge. The Stewards Bible Class of Garfield Baptist Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a class of young married couples looking for a project into which they could channel their energies, responded to the earnest plea of a retarded child’s father who queried, “Could the class possibly do something to help retarded children?”
What was originally intended to be a ministry to one little mongoloid boy in one family in one church has over the past eleven years been used by God to touch countless families with a message of hope.
Starting with one small class at Garfield Baptist Church, Shepherds has been responsible for the formation of over one hundred classes for retarded children in Regular Baptist Churches, as well as dozens of other classes. A conservative estimate suggests that this ministry reaches over five hundred boys and girls each week, to say nothing of their immediate family members who total well over twenty-five hundred persons.
—Andrew H. Wood
3382 Guarding The Asylum
A visitor to an institution for the mentally sick was astounded to observe one lone man guarding one hundred inmates. He was armed only with a small stick. Asked the visitor, “Are you not afraid that these insane people will get their heads together and plan to attack you?” “Ah,” replied the guard, “these people are here because of their inability to get their heads together and work cooperatively!” We do not know whether a psychiatrist would agree with the guard. The story, however, is most suggestive.
3383 Grand Jurors Vouch Own Sanity
Tucson, Ariz. (AP)—Twenty-one registered voters in Pima County have signed notarized statements declaring they are “not idiots.”
They were members of county grand jury which indicted Sheriff Waldon Burr on 22 felony counts, ranging from job-selling and accepting bribes to misconduct in office.
Burr’s attorney, H. Earl Rogge, Jr., had questioned among other things, their mental competency in an effort to have charges against the sheriff dropped before he comes to trial this fall.
The statements declared, in part: “I had not been convicted of treason or a felony … I was not insane, nor am I now. … and I was not an idiot, nor am I now.”
A superior court judge took the entire matter under consideration.