Falk’s Reviews > The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing > Status Update

"With the war, and the nation's first general draft, every able-bodied man in the country was given a psychological screening along with intelligence tests and medical exams. The number of potential soldiers screened out with “intolerable psychological risk profiles" was astonishingly high: some 1,875,000 men in the army alone, or 12 percent of those tested in the years 1942-45. Even with this exclusion rate, six times the rate during World War I, war neurosis in the US Armed Forces was reported at more than twice the rate as in World War I. There were more than a million neuropsychiatric admissions to army medical services, with another 150,000 from the navy, and so on—and these were from the soldiers who had passed the screening. Some 380,000 were discharged for psychiatric reasons (more than a third of all medical discharges), another 137,000 for “peronality disorders”; 120,000 psychiatric patients had to be evacuated from the field of operation, 28,000 by air.
Whether these numbers show how badly screening was needed or that it didn't work—General George C. Marshall ordered it discontinued in 1944 —there was clearly a crisis. Some people were faking, but the vast majority of cases were real, which meant two things: that mental illness affected a far greater portion of the population than anyone had dreamed of and that “healthy people” needed psychological treatment too. Only a minority of nervous breakdowns in the military took place on the front lines or even overseas. Most were caused by a variety of factors that affected people back home as well, such as “stress,” a concept rapidly spreading from military psychiatry circles to the public at large.
It was a national concern. As one history of psychotherapy in America puts it, the “pitiful” physical health of America’s young men was dire enough—“missing teeth, untreated abscesses and sores, uncorrected vision problems, uncorrected skeletal deformities, untreated chronic infections”— prompting efforts to increase the number of medical doctors and access to them across the country. Still, the 12 percent rejection rate for mental illness stood alone for its shock value.”
(...)
By the end of the war, the thirty-five [psychiatrists in the US Army] had become a thousand in the army and another seven hundred in the rest of the military, including “practically every member” of the American Psychiatric Association, “not barred by age, disability or earmarked as essential for civilian psychiatry,” as well as plenty of new recruits."
pp. 201-2