Social disintegration: effects

Drug addiction

Drug addiction is another form of retreatism which tends to increase with social disorder. Clearly a model capable of describing the rate of drug addiction would take into account other variables as well. In India, for example, because of religious aversion to alcohol in certain castes, drugs of various sorts play a big role among available cathartic outlets. They also play an important part in the rituals of many primitive peoples. Nevertheless, drug addiction as a form of retreatism undoubtedly increases with social disorder. Cloward and Ohlin [13] show that drug addiction as a form of retreatism is resorted to by deviants for whom both the legitimate and illegitimate avenues to social advancement are closed.

It is well known that drug addiction is increasing at an exponential rate in most of the industrial societies of the Western world today. At the 1969 meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs [14] it was stated that the abuse of narcotics is assuming “alarming proportions”.

In Britain, according to the British representative, it is estimated that up to 125,000 people may be showing some dependence on barbiturates and up to 100,000 on amphetamines. The latter are the staple diet of the discotheques. The National Health service is responsible for issuing some 400 million tablets a year and millions more are obtained on private prescription or simply stolen.

In the United Kingdom the number of known heroin addicts increased 60 percent between 1968 and 1969 to 2,782, 1,775 of which were 15 – 23-year-olds.

According to the Home Office Inspector for Drugs, cases could be expected to multiply by five between 1969 and 1972. If these predictions were projected to the year 2000, there would be 54,675,000 cases – and practically everyone in England would be a drug addict!

According to The Times, heroin deaths in New York City have multiplied two-fold in 3 years.

In March 1970 there were an estimated 25,000 youngsters on heroin. Dr Donald H. Houria, President of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction, predicted “within a couple of years, every high school and every college in the country will be inundated with heroin”.

In Washington, according to Dr Robert Dupont the head of the Police Department’s Narcotics Treatment Agency, there are estimated to be 15,000 addicts of whom half are juveniles. A survey conducted by him revealed that in Washington 45 percent of gaol inmates are heroin addicts.

The connection between drug addiction and more apparent psychotic states, which we know to be connected with anomie, was revealed in a study conducted by Dr Hekiemann and Gershon among random samples of 112 of the 560 drug abusers admitted to Belle Vue Psychiatric Hospital from January to July 1967. Dr Hekiemann said the most important reason for taking drugs was to escape from a strange underlying depression. Half of the drug abusers were found to have had definite pre-drug signs of schizophrenia and had been seen by psychiatrists before they had turned to drugs.

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Mental health

Social disintegration is a major cause of mental disease. When an individual deprived of his essential social and physical environment is incapable of building a substitute one, or fails to isolate himself from the one he can no longer tolerate, by means of drugs or alcohol, his behaviour pattern, no longer adaptive to an environment for which it was not designed, tends to break down. One remaining position of defence is to build up his own personal world of fantasy which contains just those environmental constituents of which he has been deprived, and which he most requires.

There is considerable evidence to show that members of a society undergoing acculturation, whose culture is breaking down under the influence of an alien one are particularly prone to mental disease.

This point is made by Wittkower and Fried. [15]

“Change which affects basic cultural values, ideals or attitudes, traditionally the core of inter-personal relations, adversely affect mental health.”

They also say,

“Evidence is accumulating to substantiate the hypothesis that mental health problems grow in direct relation to the disturbing of traditional bonds which hold families and communities together. It is suggested that individuals socialized under such well-knit family conditions may suffer when they are estranged from traditional systems of security arrangements, previously rooted in the family.”

Anthony Wallace [16] points to the same tendency:

“Anthropologists frequently have made note of the fact that primitive groups, who have been forced into situations of culture conflict and of partial, unorganized acculturation, seem prone to a higher frequency of the milder neurotic and personality trait disorders. Chronic anxiety and tension, psychosomatic complaints, alcoholism, narcotic addiction, delinquency and crime, witch fear, regressive or stunted personality development: such disorders apparently proliferate under the conditions produced by culture conflict and partial acculturation.”

Demarath [17] in a careful survey of the evidence, concludes that “wherever Schizophrenia has been reported, the society in question has been in the process of acculturation.”

Wittkower and Fried, [18] from research carried out in 1966 in Peru, found evidence that migrants from a tightly knit family background are especially vulnerable in an urban setting, and isolated from the security of their relatives. Involved in such movements are all the stresses and difficulties inherent to the tremendous readjustment immigrants must make to a novel and often hostile social cultural environment. Similar practice is reported from Formosa, “where mainland migrant patients show a parallel tendency to develop psychosomatic symptoms, as an unconscious defence against anxiety and tension.”

Dr D. C. Madison came to a similar conclusion as a result of a study of Polish migrants in New York State. He writes,

“There is a substantially higher percentage of Polish migrants in mental hospitals than would be expected from the incidence rate for the country as a whole.”

Malzberg and Lee in the study of hospital admission for the period 1939–41 in New York State, concluded that the rates of first admission to hospital for mental disease are markedly higher for migrants.

“Far more prone to mental disease than the migrant who lives among his own people and retains his own culture is a member of a minority group who is in the process of abandoning his culture in favour of a new one and who is thus undergoing acculturation.”

Malzberg and Lee found that “the rates of first admission for total psychoses were much higher for recent than for earlier migrants”.

Victor D. Sauna [19] in a study of personality adjustment among different generations of American Jews and non-Jews shows that Jews leading the ghetto life are very conservative and orthodox and have a low rate of mental ill-health. The Jew who is marginal, i.e. between two cultures, is submitted to far greater tension.

It appears that whereas the second generation of Jews, the marginal ones between two cultures, had a high rate of mental illness, third-generation Jews are far less marginal, having succeeded to a certain extent in adapting themselves to the world of the non-Jews, and thus again come out of it with a better mental-disease level.

Wilson and Lantz, [20] in a study of state hospital admissions, showed that the Southern Negroes pay a heavy toll in mental illness for their partial emancipation. When they were living entirely among themselves, or even as slaves, mental health was much better. “It appears that negroes, when refusing to abide by the white man’s dictum of where one belongs in society, occasionally lose the security of the earlier position.”

Gillin [21] who has conducted research on this subject in Central America also observes: “So long as the Indian stays within the framework of his culture, he is less prone to be beset by anxieties and frustrations, which the Ladino culture almost inevitably creates.”

As national boundaries break down, small communities are swallowed up by vast urban conglomerations, mobility is increased and people move about the place in search of better pay, so cultural patterns break down.

In the United Kingdom, mental disease is increasing at a phenomenal rate. According to Ministry of Health statistics 169,160 people were admitted to hospitals in England and Wales in 1967 suffering from mental illness, two and a half times as many as in 1951.

There were 600,000 mentally disordered people in England and Wales in 1967, 186,901 of them occupying hospital beds or 46.6 percent of all hospital beds. 32 million working days every year are lost because of mental illness, representing a cost to the nation of £100 million, and local authorities spent £20,250,000 in mental health, more than six times what was spent in 1957.

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Suicide

Durkheim [22] regarded suicide as the ultimate manifestation of anomie. He found that the suicide rate was particularly low in poor rural communities where social structures were intact, and high in disintegrating affluent societies, especially among the working classes and even more so among immigrants, in this case Italians, to the cities of Lorraine.

He goes so far as to say that “suicide varies in inverse proportion to the degree of integration of the social groups to which the individual belongs”.

Dr Ralph S. Paffenberger, Junior, headed a recent study whose object was to determine the traits in youth that predisposed them to suicide. The survey was carried out among 50,000 college graduates whose histories after leaving college were carefully traced.

The trait found to be the most significant was the loss of the student’s father in pre-college days, i.e. to the disintegration of the family unit in early youth.

In Britain the suicide rate has fallen over the last six years by about 200 a year. Nevertheless, according to the Samaritans, a lay organization that helps depressed and potentially suicidal people, the number of potential suicides has more than doubled in the last two years.

In 1967 their seven London area branches dealt with 5,999 new cases. In 1969 the same branches dealt with a further 11,641 cases. The Reverend Basil Higginson an official of this organization, estimated that in 1970 there would be about 60,000 new cases.

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Conclusion

There is every reason to believe that the social ills at present afflicting our society – increasing crime, delinquency, vandalism, alcoholism as well as drug addiction – are closely related and are the symptoms of the breakdown of our cultural pattern which in turn is an aspect of the disintegration of our society. These tendencies can only be accentuated by further demographic and economic growth. It is chimeric to suppose that any of these tendencies can be checked by the application of external controls or by treating them in isolation, i.e. apart from the social disease of which they are but the symptoms.

It is the cause itself, unchecked economic and demographic growth, that must be treated. Until such time as the most radical measures are undertaken for this purpose, these tendencies will be further accentuated – until their cost becomes so high that further growth ceases to be viable.

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References

1.	Hebb, D. O. 1961. The Organisation of Behaviour. New York: John Wiley.
2.	Zingg, Robert M. and J.A.L. Singh. 1942. Wolf Children and Feral Man. New York: Harper.
3.	Harlow, Harry. 1962. “Social deprivation in monkeys”. In Scientific American, November 1962.
4.	Bowbey, John. 1965. Child Care and the Growth of Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
5a.	Janheinz, Jahn. 1958. Muntu. London: Faber & Faber.
5b.	Kagame, Alexis. 1966. “La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de L’Etre”. In Academie Royale des Sciences D’Outre Mer.
6.	Cloward, Richard E. and Lloyd E. Ohlin. 1966. Delinquency and Opportunity. New York: Collier/Macmillan.
7.	Merton, Robert K. 1967. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press.
8.	Mead, Margaret. 1959. “Mental health in world perspective”. In Opler, Marvin. 1959. Culture and Mental Health. New York: Macmillan.
9.	Linton, Ralph. 1965. The Study of Man. London: Peter Owen.
10.	Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. 1890. A History of European Morals. London: Longmans.
11.	Field. 1961. Social Psychological Correlation of Drunkenness in Primitive Tribes. Harvard University: Unpublished thesis.
12.	Madsen, William. 1964. “The Alcoholic Agringado : Alcohol Symposium”. In American Anthropologist, April 1964.
13.	Cloward, Richard E. and Lloyd E. Ohlin. 1966. [Above].
14.	Journal of the American Medical Association, July 1968.
15.	Wittkower, Eric D. and Jacob Fried. 1959. “Some problems of transcultural psychiatry”. In Opler, Marvin. 1959. Culture and Mental Health. New York Macmillan.
16.	Wallace, Anthony. 1967. Culture and Personality. New York: Random House.
17.	Demarath.1942. “Schizophrenia among Primitives”. In American Journal of Psychiatry 98.
18.	Wittkower, Eric D. and Jacob Fried. 1959. [above]
19.	Sauna, Victor. 1959. “Differences to personality adjustment among different generations of American Jews and Non-Jews”. In Opler, Marvin. 1959. Culture and Mental Health. New York: Collier / Macmillan.
20.	Wilson and Lantz. 1957. “The effect of cultural change on the Negro race in Virginia”. In American Journal of Psychiatry, 114.
21.	Gillin, John,1951. “The Culture of security in San Carlos, New Orleans”. In Middle American Research Institution, Publication No. 16.
22.	Durkheim, Emile. 1952. Suicide; a Study in Sociology. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul.

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