T HERE is a general belief present among the peoples of the Western world which holds that certain major cultural catastrophies, such as war, revolution, and economic crises, play a role in the production of certain forms of mental derangements. This belief has received, as yet, little scientific verification, partly because of certain methodological difficulties present in such an investigation and partly because of the limitations of available data. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate certain difficulties inherent in this problem and, utilizing several different approaches, to propose some hypotheses which might be tested for certain possible relationships between war and mental disorder. In this sense, we are viewing war as an independent variable with the possibility that certain forms of mental disorder, as dependent variables, may bear some functional relationship to it. At the outset, it should be made clear that we are not concerned with the question of the direct influence of warfare in the production of mental diseases and neuroses among those men actively engaged in combat. There is already in existence a voluminous psychiatric literature which treats of this problem and which developed as a result of the first World War., In contrast, the focus of attention in this paper is primarily sociological. We wish to explore the possibility of studying the role of war, viewed as an institutional weapon of society for settling inter-group conflicts, as directly contributing to an increase of certain forms of mental derangement in a given population. While investigations of this problem are almost negligible,2 there are certain analogous studies in the literature. Here, we are referring to those studies which have attempted to show the relationship between war or economic crises and certain types of personality disorganization and deviant social conduct as manifested by criminality, suicide, and divorce or family disintegration.3 We intend to examine some of these studies in order to indicate the approach which has been used in the past to this and other similar problems. Most of these studies have been confined to the computation and analysis of the trend of rates before, during, and after a major war. For example, Rosenbaum,4 in attempting to study the relation between war and crime in the Civil and World War periods, reports an increase of crime following each war and a marked decrease in crime during the war. She concludes that this increase in the crime rate following the war is caused by the breakdown of social controls attendant upon the war period and to the post-war insecurity. Exner,6 in studying this same problem but taking account of the different types of crime, utilizes the same techniques and comes to a similar conclusion regarding the trend of criminality in Austria following the World War. In addition, he finds that crimes against the person decrease while property crimes increase following the war period. In much the same manner, Malzberg,6 in a careful statistical analysis, studied the role of the recent economic crisis as a factor accounting for an in-