Mental distress

“ The physical side of agreeable emotions, as a rule, is a heightened tone of the purely animal functions. The physical side of fear is a complicated series of effects, one of them being the depression of the organic processes, digestion among the rest. In this respect, however, it more or less resembles severe pain, sorrow, shame, remorse, and other states, characterised by the general phrase “depressing passions;” the depression being both mental and physical. ”

“ Excessive ambition, misdirected energy, longing for the unattainable, regret for the unalterable, anticipation of future unhappiness, lack of a sense of perspective, fretting over non-essentials, indecision, reopening of troublesome questions already settled, avarice, selfishness, excessive emotions, uncontrolled passions, and the actual cultivation of the melancholic state are some of the causes of mental anguish and subsequent physical suffering. ”

“ The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled; prejudice—the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion—takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by on-lookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease. ”

“ When we have constructed a true psychological pathology, we shall understand clearly why and how it is that fear can turn the hair gray in a single night; that a mother's milk can be poisoned by a moment of terror; that the heart may be paralyzed by a sudden joy or sorrow; that dyspepsia, paralysis, and many other diseases are produced by mental worry and fret and the brain-fag of overwork and anxiety. ”

“ On the other, any diversion of mind that lifts the burden of grief even to some degree, releases new stimuli and physical powers for the restoration of bodily function to the normal and this brings about an immediate lessening of the depressive condition. In a word, for the vicious circle of unfavorable influences ever pushing the victim farther into depression, a virtuous circle, in the Latin sense of the word virtue, meaning courage, favoring strength, must be formed, that brings about an immediate improvement in the patient's mental and physical well-being. ”

“ When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ I know that a state of worry may arise from physical causes. Inflamed nerves, mental depressions, or hysterical fears, are, in many instances, quite beyond the control of the sufferer. With others there is an intense desire to do something or get something done ”

“ In any discussion of the influence of mind over body, favorable and unfavorable, too much emphasis cannot be placed on the hold that dreads have over a great many people and how much they mean, not alone for the mental state, but also for the physical sense of well-being or of ill-feeling in the individual. ”

“ The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed. ”

“ But perhaps we have not sufficiently indicated a diseased state of consciousness, from which most intellectual men have suffered, many have died, and all should be warned,--the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and the result of mental debility. ”

“ Every human being experiences it in daily life. This despair may be caused by physical strain, mental tension with deep thought or by some shock. Everyone experiences this kind of indecision in life at some point or other. ”

“ Some cases terminate in a chronic condition which may improve somewhat in time. There may be a persistent emotional and mental enfeeblement with indifference, loss of memory, lack of judgment and impairment of will. ”

“ The frank recognition of this fact by them and a consultation of the calendar when they find that everything seems to be going against them and that everybody is lacking in sympathy, usually leads to an appreciation of the fact that the trouble is in themselves rather than in those around them, and their condition becomes more bearable. It is curious, however, to note how often this is forgotten, with consequent give-and-take of irritation in their environment that makes the nervous and mental condition worse and emphasizes the physical symptoms. ”

“ Such acts, when really due to mental instability, occur either in depressed or maniacal conditions, and these, as is now well known from carefully collected statistics, inevitably recur, or in weakened toxic conditions in susceptible subjects, and a return to the old mode of life may at any time bring recurrences. ”

“ If disturbances from explosion and from emotional shock, existing with or without traumatism, produce identical results, it is evident that they have a common factor and this common factor can be only the emotion itself. ”

“ Their perpetual solicitude for him, acting as a suggestion of irresistible force, tends to engender in him a mental attitude out of which may afterward spring, according to the subsequent circumstances of his life, a cold, heartless, calculating selfishness, or a morbid self-anxiety, perhaps eventuating in all sorts of neurotic symptoms. ”

“ Originating, apparently, from stress of adverse circumstances, it has become an acquired taste, the indulgence of which has created a peculiar form of mental disorder, with lack of feeling, love of fighting, cruelty, and general human degeneracy, as prominent attributes. ”

“ Associative life becomes disturbed, and emotional reactions become morbid. There is a degeneration or reversion to earlier and lower forms of mental activity, and to lower instinctive life. The primitive instincts, the impulse of self-preservation and the fear instinct, come to the foreground, giving rise to the various forms of psychopathic affections. ”

“ My dear friend, are mental perplexity and despondency, moral difficulty, spiritual apathy, and a general bitter internal struggle with existence, less real trials, less positive troubles, than the most afflicting circumstances generally so classed? ”

“ This must be done not alone because along this way lies relief of suffering, since not a little of the discomfort is due to the mental concentration consequent upon the dread, but because, also, the discouraged state of mind interferes with the trophic influences that go down from the central nervous system to the periphery to keep it in good health and to restore function when there is anything out of order. In a word, the exaggeration of significance so likely to influence such patients for ill must, as far as possible, be removed for their immediate relief as well as ultimate cure. ”

“ And as, when head or eye in us is smit By assailing pain, we are not tortured then Through all the body, so the mind alone Is sometimes smitten, or livens with a joy, Whilst yet the soul's remainder through the limbs And through the frame is stirred by nothing new. But when the mind is moved by shock more fierce, We mark the whole soul suffering all at once Along man's members: sweats and pallors spread Over the body, and the tongue is broken, And fails the voice away, and ring the ears, Mists blind the eyeballs, and the joints collapse,— Aye, men drop dead from terror of the mind. ”

“ The earliest mental symptoms are change of character, increased irritability, less feeling of accountability, a lower moral tone, moral perversion, diminished stability, loss of interest, lessened power of concentration and self-control, impulsive acts, anxiety or the opposite condition of mind, perverted or exaggerated force of the emotions, restlessness, apprehension, sleeplessness, impaired will, slight depression or barely noticeable exhilaration: things and persons seem changed in some vague, unexplained way. ”

“ The statistics from the NIMH study reveal how very wide-spread personal psychological difficulties are. Given the degree of complexity of our mental, emotional, and spiritual makeup, this should be understandable, especially when we take into account twentieth-century stresses that wear us down. ”

“ On the other hand, the development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression, which can also last for a considerable period of time is untreated, might satisfy the prolonged hard requirement. ”

“ Thus that nervous anxiety to hastily repair broken fortunes, and to prevent still greater ruin and distress, embraces nearly all classes, and imprints upon all the movements of the social body a morbid character. ”

“ Third, let us now consider another different yet quite as prolific source of mental pain and its resulting invalidism, namely, that which is to be found in the ever-insistent consciousness of misfit into the ever-growing complexity and demands of the life of to-day, the necessarily consequent failure to realize what has been legitimately expected and striven for, and all the mental wear and tear which so necessarily follows or accrues. ”

“ However, depression, anxiety, intolerance to stress, disorientation, unsettling fears, unusual behavior—these are much less readily understood by nonspecialists. There is a tendency for many people to judge rather harshly what they do not comprehend. When many individuals who are ignorant of psychology hear of someone in emotional distress, the inclination is often to condemn. Condemnation is frequently an expression of fear—fear of what is not understood. ”

“ Here is where the sufferer must exert his will power, change completely his mental and physical habits and his surroundings. Occupation, changed habits, taking in of confidence, faith and courage thoughts—these changes are necessary to the victim of melancholia, or he will shatter on the danger rocks and go to pieces. ”

“ For neither the absence of all symptoms of physical or of clearly mental disease, nor the presence of an astounding frequency, abruptness, and completeness of change in the psycho-physical actions and functions of the living person, nor, above all, the conjunction of these two peculiarities, are for us now, taken by themselves, anything but indications of nervous, hysterical derangement. ”

“ A small ray of light may be thrown on the matter, if we consider the fact of those strange weaknesses and mental abnormalities in our own species, which are supposed to have their origin in violent emotional and other peculiar mental states in one of our parents. ”

“ They develop in an emotional soil definitely related to the hopes and fears of the healthy individual and are to be looked upon as a morbid transformation of perfectly normal mechanisms. In addition to this he speaks of an increased self-consciousness, a natural tendency to resistiveness, an undeveloped type of thinking, psychological compensations for the disappointments of life, evidences of developmental inhibitions, improper habits of thought leading to morbid conceptions, etc. He refers to exaggerated self-consciousness as the fundamental basis of paranoia. ”

“ Emotional disturbances lead directly to the overthrow of the mental balance, which divides the normal man from the madman and the neurasthenic. Modern psychiatrists lay stress on the emotional character of the latter affection. The underlying features of "functional neurosis" reveal themselves in symptoms denoting the clash of emotional elements within, together with a corresponding lack of adaptability to outer environment, and are characterized by instability and exaggeration of emotion rather than impaired intellect. ”

“ Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. ”

“ The real is confused with the false. In business the patient becomes careless and unreliable, overlooks important transactions and forgets appointments. There are often subjective feelings of impending illness. The mood becomes depressed, whining and tearful. Irritability and outbursts of anger occasionally appear, characterized by a marked emotional instability, varying rapidly from tears to laughter. ”

“ What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis? ”