Distress signal

“ Mental disturbance—grief, worry, excitement—produce immediate physical effect in headache, palpitations and the like. Physical exhaustion—privation, hunger and over-work—on the other hand produce mental depression and collapse. ”

“ It must not be forgotten, however, that neurotic patients exaggerate their pains and describe their distress in the heart region as extremely severe and as producing a sense of impending death, when all they mean is that, because the pain is near their heart it produces an extreme solicitude and that a dread of death comes over them because of this anxiety. ”

“ It is a small price to pay if emotional symptoms can be traced to a physical cause.
It is well known that virtually any serious organic illness or injury can produce emotional suffering, either in the form of physical pain or in the form of anxiety and depression. Chronic pain is a chronic stress and can lead to the same emotional problems as prolonged stress of any variety: anxiety or depression. Similarly, prolonged severe anxiety or depression can cause physical deterioration and make the body more susceptible to disease. ”

“ The fatigue, pains and aches, changes in mood and emotion are born of this reaction, except in those cases where they arise from definite bodily disease, and even here a vicious circle is established. The weakness and fatigue state, the consciousness of impaired power brought about by sickness, are reacted to in a neurasthenic manner. It is not often enough realized by physicians that a physical defect or a physical injury may be reacted to so as to bring about nervous and mental symptoms; may cause the emotions of fear, hopeless anger, and sorrow; may cause an agony of doubt. ”

“ When it does not arise from sudden or violent agitation or distress of mind, it may be regarded as a symptom of a disturbance of the nervous functions by disease, in which case attention should be directed to the removal of the primary affection. ”

“ The quick blush, the sudden paling of the cheeks, the start of fear, the dilated pupils of fright are the direct result of the action of involuntary muscles under control of the sympathetic system. The stimulus is received by the central nervous system; the fibers connecting the central and the sympathetic systems carry the message quickly to the latter, which immediately respond by ordering contraction or expansion of involuntary muscles. So tears flow, we breathe freely again or we quake and tremble, our pupils widen or contract, the heart beats suffocatingly, or seems almost to stop. ”

“ The discomforts are usually spoken of as pains, especially after the patient has been dwelling on them for some time and has been reading patent medicine advertisements that tell of how women suffer in silence, but analysis often shows that they are sensations of pressure, of compression, of achy distress at most, and sometimes only of unusual feelings—paresthesiae—that having got over the threshold of consciousness, through concentration of attention upon them, are occupying the center of the stage of mental activity to the exclusion of all serious interests. ”

“ We know also of central inhibitions, such as fear, distress, pain, acting as so many inhibitions on the peripheral organs and serving to arrest functioning activity. Similarly in mental life, complex as it is, the highly organized psycho-physiological systems, with their concomitant moments consciousness, still fall under the same general physiological laws of inhibition. ”

“ Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness—in a word, forgotten—remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the [234] nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid. ”

“ Pain, the major emotions—fear and [p. 36] rage—and also intense excitement, are manifested in the activities of the sympathetic division. When in these states impulses rush out over the neurones of this division they produce all the changes typical of sympathetic excitation, such as dilating the pupils, inhibiting digestion, causing pallor, accelerating the heart, and various other well-known effects. ”

“ Under the influence of strong stimulation such as mechanical and chemical agencies, and psychic affections, such as intense emotions of fear, anger, grief, anxiety, or worry, the degenerative process of disaggregation sets in, affecting first the higher aggregates and then with the continuity and intensity of the stimulations the process descends deeper and deeper affecting less complex aggregates, finally reaching the simplest aggregates of moments. The higher types of moments degenerate and fall to lower and lower stages of consciousness. ”

“ In most instances patients reported the attack struck with almost the impact of a physical blow. The prodromal symptoms were usually slight ... a sudden feeling of uneasiness and guilt ... hot and cold flashes ... dizziness ... double vision. Then this ghastly sense of depression coupled with a blind insensate rage at life. One man said he felt as if the world were closing in on him. Another that he felt the people around him were plotting his destruction. One housewife made her husband lock her in her room for fear she would injure the children. ”

“ Nevertheless I denied my condition, and so one day the doctor tried to explain it to me. “A person,” he began, “is said to be nervous when presenting a special susceptibility to pain, or exhibiting an undue mobility of the nervous system, as when one starts, or shakes on the occasion of abrupt or intense sensorial impressions, thus showing an exalted emotional susceptibility. ”

“ To a stranger and bystander, this occupation appeared more dangerous than it really was; in persons habituated to bodily difficulty, the nervous system became gradually braced, and the solids attained that state of rigidity which banished irritability; while the mind, accustomed to scenes of danger, lost that timidity which frequently led to the dreadful disaster. ”

“ By a line of humorous reflection already suggested, we may in all cases of worry and moral disturbance reach the consolatory idea that the trouble has, in the first view of it, been grossly exaggerated. At the moment when the sensitive tissue is lacerated the shock of pain blinds us to dimensions; our disappointment fills the outlook, like a thunder-storm. The healthy nervous organism will show its vitality in the rapidity of the recuperative process ”

“ Disturbances of psychic functions include delirium, confusion, amnesia, hallucinations, terrifying battle dreams, anxiety states. The disturbances of involuntary functions include functional heart disorders, low blood pressure, vomiting and diarrhea, enuresis, retention or polyuria, dyspnoea, sweating. Disturbances of voluntary muscular functions include paralyses, tics, tremors, gait disturbances, contractures and convulsive movements. Special senses may be affected producing pains and anesthesias, mutism, deafness, hyperacusis, blindness and disorders of speech. ”

“ Among the rarer proximate causes are loss of blood, starvation, nervous exhaustion from mental overwork, sexual excesses, and sudden fright, or rather the shudder which sometimes follows the nervous shock produced by a real or imaginary danger, as a slip of the foot at the brink of a steep declivity, a snake-panic, the unexpected visit of a stranger, etc. ”

“ From the irregularity of the circulation of the blood induced by prolonged grief, varied central phenomena in the nervous matter follow, and in persons who have passed middle life these phenomena are usually permanent if not progressive. They consist of organic feebleness extending to all the active organs of the body, and affecting specially the mental organism, A constant desire for rest, for avoidance of cares, for seclusion, mark this stage of disease, if so it may be called. ”

“ And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. ”

“ Four of these terminated the experiment because of anxiety and panic; seven did so because of physical discomfort. The results confirmed earlier findings that (1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects. ”

“ The excitement of fear in the mind still more accelerates heart action and respiration, intensifies the local congestion and greatly increases the morbid accumulations in the system. In the last chapters of this volume we shall deal especially with the deteriorating influence of fear, anxiety, anger, irritability, impatience, etc., and explain how these and all other destructive emotions actually poison the secretions of the body. ”

“ The functions of the brain suffer much disturbance. Melancholy, and a disposition for reverie, attend the early stages of the complaint; and there is sometimes an uncommon irritability of mind. The dreams become frightful, and are interrupted by sudden starting up in terror. Strange illusions present themselves. The mental faculties are impaired. The termination of the disease is attended with slight delirium ”

“ It is associated with high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, strokes, ulcers, colitis, and a host of other physical conditions. And severe stress endured too long leads to emotional breakdown.
All physical materials can be loaded or stressed to a certain point beyond which they distort, snap, fracture, or break. Stress loads human beings physically as well as emotionally. Any change—whether for good or for ill—is a stressor. ”

“ Factory supervisors and insurance companies were frantic over the upsurge in accidents. It was estimated that almost fifty per cent of the population exhibited the symptoms of depression, absent-mindedness, insomnia and loss of appetite. ”

“ It is known only too well today by those who seek to know, that back of all such physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the nervous system and mind. ”

“ In our laboratory experiments and in our clinical observations we have found that exhaustion produced by intense emotion, prolonged physical exertion, insomnia, intense fear, certain toxemias, hemorrhage, and the condition commonly denominated surgical shock, produce similar outward manifestations and identical brain-cell changes. ”

“ Nature is slow in resenting her injuries; but the memory of them is indelibly impressed, and treasured up for a late, but certain revenge. Nervousness, lowness of spirits, headache, and all the countless train of morbid and deranged corporeal and mental action, are, at once, the cause and the effect of sorrow and anxiety, increased by a constant series of action and reaction. ”

“ And now, one final word in conclusion, for the purpose of drawing together, as it were, the multiplicity of threads which constitute the complex skein of causes and effects, with their remedial measures which cover the wide range of human life's vicissitudes—the interruptions of its would-be harmonies—which take the forms, all too common in these times of stress, of physical disturbance and of mental strain which come to us in the combined and threatening guise of suffering and disease. ”

“ A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright. Time passes, the fright is completely forgotten, or, at most, vaguely remembered. But one day unmistakable, and sometimes exceedingly peculiar, symptoms of disease appear. The victim, it may be, suffers from a strange obsession or “fixed idea,” or from a general “nervous breakdown,” or from an actual paralysis of some bodily organ, or from the development of abdominal or other enlargements resembling true organic growths. ”

“ The latter, if experienced in such psycho-neuroses, can often from his knowledge of the phenomena of emotion anticipate the facts and in a large degree foretell to the patient the list of symptoms from which he suffers. By those who lack familiarity with these functional disturbances mistakes in diagnosis are frequently made. Disease of the heart, or of the stomach, or of the nervous system is frequently diagnosed when the symptoms are simply the product of emotion. ”

“ How strange it is that a simple feeling of discomfort, impeded or heightened circulation, perhaps the irritation of a nervous thread, a slight congestion, a small disturbance in the imperfect and delicate functions of our living machinery, can turn the most lighthearted of men into a melancholy one, and make a coward of the bravest! ”

“ Once a psychosomatic link has been established between a troubled mind and the body, and an organic disorder has come about, the physical disorder, in turn, can produce stronger or more exaggerated emotional reactions. Anxiety or depression may increase because the person is now both physically ill and emotionally troubled. ”