SIR: The current public interest in psychiatry, as manifested by magazine articles, pictures
and cartoons, contemporary literature and moving pictures, offers us as psychiatrists a
challenge for direct action. It is a challenge to us to gain public participation in problems of
research and care of the mentally ill in America, who fill 55% of all our hospital beds. The
public partici-pation in the “March of Dimes,” the Christmas Seal sale and the drives of the
American Heart Association and American Cancer Society have not only secured funds for …