How TO WORRY SUCCESSFULLY—David Seabury—Little, Brown ($2.50).
According to Dr. David Seabury, a group of English mathematicians recently reported "that in two centuries there will no longer be in Europe a single person in possession of his reason." In 1859 there was one insane person in every 535; by 1927 the proportion was down to one in 312; by 1929 it was one in 150. Some psychologists hold that everybody is crazy now. Dr. A. J. Desloges, director of hospitals for the insane for the province of Quebec, said that "the whole world would be insane in a quarter of a century," later revised his figures, made it ten years. He added the doleful news that the population in mental hospitals is increasing, but ''there are more insane outside of the hospitals than in them."
Last week Dr. Seabury included such excellent incitements to worry in his optimistic, informal, 358-page manual on the art of worrying as it is done under the guidance of experts. Like most such cheerful volumes, How to Worry Successfully contains a great deal of helpful advice that is almost certain to drive into a frenzy anyone worried about anything more serious than a bad cold or a ticket for overtime parking. It also contains some practical observations on how to sleep, instructions in physical exercises that seem as likely to break a patient's back as make him relax, shrewd words on how to detect bad influences, how to keep your wife from reading in bed, how to locate habit-patterns that lead to incorrect appraisals of a bad situation, how to detect inhibitions that block purposeful action, how to recognize worry when it sneaks into the consciousness disguised as deep feelings, jealousy or thought. It also contains little stories grained into the theoretical material: Tucker Ames worried until he could not get ahead because his daughter was in the hospital, his business failing, and his wife in love with another man; Phyllis Foster worried over injustice; Gabriel Gadbury worried over his wife's extravagance; Robert E. Lee refused to worry over what history would say of his surrender; Martin Luther chose to be true to himself when "faced with one of the greatest decisions in history." In it are to be found a catalog of definitions of worry, a quotation from Kipling's If and a running commentary on worry and the social order. Although real worriers are likely to feel that Dr. Seabury has made everything too easy, and that the characters in his stories of people who triumphed over worry never nad much to worry about anyway, cheerful readers without a care in their hearts can confidently take it up as a valuable, entertaining volume, to be opened at those moments when the wolf howls outside the door and the little grey men start sneaking out of the patterns of the wall paper.