Morbid Missionaries

For three years, Psychiatrist James Lincoln McCartney watched, studied, ministered to the missionary mind. He recognized the presence of a curious mental instability among transplanted Westerners. In the clinics of St. Luke's Hospital, Shanghai, he saw many a case written down as "neurasthenic," "insane," "neurotic." In the Peking Union Medical College, he heard fellow psychiatrists place the blame on food, climate, economic readjustments. But enthusiastic, 30-year-old Dr. McCartney sought a subtler, more basic cause.

Last week, he told his theory to the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. He went back to the beginnings of the missionary urge, theorized:

"Most of these workers are secured during the impressionable period of adolescence, when these young men and women naturally tend toward religious fanaticism, if unduly influenced. . . .

"On arriving on the foreign-mission field, the new worker finds himself or herself in a totally foreign moral environment with a radically divergent system of sexual and personal ethics, which he or she is usually not prepared to combat. The possibilities for the stimulation and gratification of the sexual side of the psychic Occidental are more numerous in the Orient, and the continual flaunting of the erotic makes its impression on the unstable personality. If he evades it, it callouses his nature; if he succumbs to its wiles, it erodes him. In either case he may be thrown into a morbid mental condition."