Applied Psychology for Nurses, Mary F. Porter [100 best novels of all time txt] 📗

every man they see, not because they want to hurt or kill, but because they are obsessed to the performance of the action.

A tic is a useless, habitual spasm of a muscle imitating a once purposeful action.

Motor tics, such as habitual jerking of the arms, shrugging the shoulder, contorting the face, shaking or nodding the head, snapping the fingers, etc., are very common among nervous children, and even in many otherwise normal grown-ups.

Distractibility is an abnormal variation of attention.

The common inability of the hypomanic patient to hold his attention to any subject when another is open, is very like the distractibility of the child who turns to every new interest as it is presented.

Negativism is a state of persistent compulsion to contrary response to suggestion.

It is with these patients as though not only initiative were lost but also the power to follow another’s lead. But their independence asserts itself in opposing every suggestion and in acting so far as possible contrary to it.

Mutism, as used in psychiatry, is an abnormal inhibition to speech.

Patients sometimes speak no word in many months. To all appearance they are true mutes. Then suddenly something may remove the mental blockade and they talk.

Compulsive acts are acts contrary to reason, which the will cannot prevent.

A seemingly quite normal patient will sometimes grab a vase from a stand in passing, and dash it to the floor. Something “urged” him to do it, and he could not resist. Others will tear their clothes to shreds, not in anger, but because they “could not help it.”

Psychomotor overactivity is abnormal activity of both mind and body, contrary to reason and uncontrolled by will.

Psychomotor retardation is an underactivity of both mind and body in which consciousness is dulled and the body sluggish.

A neurosis is a disorder of the nerves, which may be functional or organic.

Nervousness is properly termed a psychoneurosis—for we have learned that there can be no neurosis without an accompanying psychosis.

Psychosis is the technical synonym for insanity.

Borderland disorders constitute a group in which mental perversions do not yet so dominate reactions as to make them irrational.

Twilight is neither night nor day; the feelings of the hysteric are not insane, but the actions may be.

Insanity is a prolonged departure from the individual’s normal standard of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Mania is insane excitement.

Melancholia is the inability of the mind to react to any stimulus with other than gloom and depression.

Melancholia may be of the intellectual type or of the emotional type. The patient who tells you constantly that he has murdered all his children, that he is a criminal beyond the power of God to redeem, who seems chained to his delusions, yet shows no adequate feeling reaction, no genuine sorrow, we call a case of the intellectual type of melancholia. Another patient misinterprets every normal reason for happiness until it becomes a cause of settled foreboding. The mother, whose son fought safely through the war and is now returning to her, feels that his coming forecasts calamity for him. He had better have died in France. She is of the emotional type of melancholia.

Hysteria is a nervous disorder based upon suggestibility, and capable of imitating most known diseases.

Insane impulses are morbid demands for reckless action beyond the control of the will.

Example: The impulse to kill, quite regardless of who may be the victim.

Psychopathic personality is a term much used today to designate an hereditary tendency on the part of the individual to mental disorder.

The neuropath is the individual with an inborn tendency to the neurosis.

Neurotic is a term broadly employed for the nervous in whom emotions predominate over reason.

Neurasthenia is a nervous disorder characterized by undue fatiguability.

Psychasthenia is a nervous disorder characterized by a sense of unreality, weakness of will, self-accusation, and usually by phobias and obsessions, all subject to temporary correction by reason or influence from without.

Hypochondriasis is a disorder characterized by morbid attention to bodily sensations, and insistent ideas of bodily disorder.

Phobia is a morbid fear or dread.

FACTORS CAUSING VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES Heredity

When we consider the accumulated possibilities for disorder which the family tree of almost any one of us can show, the wonder is not that there are so many nervous or insane, but rather that any come within hailing distance of the normal. For multitudes are born of parents whose bodies were food poisoned or alcohol or drug poisoned, and whose nervous systems were tense and irritable, oversensitive, and suffering from the effect of these same toxins on the brain. Others are of manic-depressive parentage; some are possibly even of paranoic or dementia præcox lineage; while many of our finest and best had psychopathic or neuropathic heredity. Syphilis, itself, and the underpower bodies of tuberculosis are heritages of many.

When we realize, too, that we are born with certain inherent tendencies of temperament, which are too often of the melancholic or overcholeric type, our wonder grows that we are not doomed to defeat at birth. Were it not for the possibilities in the germ-plasm of choosing the much of good also in our heredity, often enough to overbalance the bad, and for the proved power of environment and training to modify or even altogether overcome the harmful parts of our birthright, there would be little hope for many.

Environment

While environment may prove the saving grace from poor heredity, it may itself add heavily to the debit side. With the very best of health backgrounds, environment may damage body and mind beyond repair. Under environment we include everything that touches life from without—people, things, work, play, home, school, social life, business life, college-life, etc. Among factors of environment damaging to mental health are overemotional family life, overstrict home discipline or the lack of needed discipline; overfeeding, underfeeding, wrong diet, lack of proper exercise, stimulants, drugs, overstimulation, overprotection, too much hardship and privation, loneliness, poor educational methods, immorality, etc.

Personal Reactions

What will decide whether a human being can resist, successfully, bad tendencies in heredity, or in environment, or in both, and keep a reasonably balanced mind? It demands insight, ambition, will; and if these remain the body can be forced to saving ways of health, and body and mind can largely make their own environment. But with heavy handicaps of heredity or environment, or both, and poor insight, or lack of desire, or weak will, nothing can save the mind from neurotic taint or worse—nothing but obedience to some one strong enough to control the habits of that life, until self-control is born. And there is a hope that it can be born in the most neurotic or neurasthenic, so long as the mind is sane.

But after all, a large number of people whose mental processes are not normal, have only themselves, their poor emotions, their lazy wills, their hazy thinking to blame. We except what are called the heredity insanities—dementia præcox and the other dementias and the manic-depressive groups and paranoia and psychasthenia—for in these cases, possibly with the exception of the manic depressives, even the most perfect environment could probably not prevent the disorder from asserting itself. Many neurotics, neurasthenics, and hysterics are curable if they will seriously undertake to fulfil the laws of physical and mental health—simple laws, but ones which demand a strengthened will to carry out.

CHAPTER X
ATTENTION THE ROOT OF DISEASE OR HEALTH ATTITUDE The Attention of Interest

Attention naturally follows interest. It can, however, be held by will to the unappealing, with the usual result of transforming it into a thing of interest.

One of the laws of the mind we have already stressed is that what we attend to largely determines what we are, or shall be. The interests which secure our consideration may be the passive result of emotional life, the things which naturally appeal, which give us sensations that the mind normally heeds; or they may be the active result of our will which has forced application upon the things which reason advised as worth acquiring.

We found that the beginning of health of mind consists in the directing of thought toward the health-bringing attitude. We have seen how quickly the normal mind can be diverted from the undesirable by a new or stronger emotional stimulus. We found that the sole appeal to attention in the baby-life is through the emotions, and that it is natural throughout life for the mind to heed and follow the interesting; which is only another way of saying that thinking follows where emotion leads, unless volition steps in to prevent. The supreme test of the will’s power is its ability to hold the train of thought in the line that reason directs, when feeling would draw it elsewhere. This ability marks the man who does big things; while the inability to ever turn attention away from the interests proposed by feeling assures weakness.

Some of the most charming people we shall ever know are those temperamental children of happiness whose interests are naturally wholesome and externalized, whose natures are spontaneous and joyous, and who live as they feel, seemingly never knowing the stress of forced concentration. With them attention follows feeling, feeling is sweet and true, and volition simply carries out what feeling dictates. And life may not be complicated.

But there is another class whose attention also follows in the ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses of it. We say that each type has projected himself, that is, has thrust himself out into the external world, and is standing back, looking at his own nature and calling that the universe.

But neither of these two groups can long withstand the stress of a world they only feel and have never attempted to comprehend. The irresponsibly happy ones are too often crushed and broken when life proves to bring loss and failure and disappointment; the morbid probably will cease some day to enjoy their melancholic moods, and be unable to find their way out of them. If both had learned to control attention, they might have been saved. The happy, care-free child of the light is at desperate loss when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to him he never attended to them—and now he cannot. If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than spineless feeling distractibility, might have saved him.

When thinking can be forced to follow where trained reason directs, and can be kept in that direction, the greatest problem of physical and nervous well being is solved. To the nurse there is no other principle of psychology so important. But no child ever had his attention diverted by reasoning alone. The object at which you wish him to look must be made more impelling than the one he already sees, or he must want much to please you, else he only with his eyes will follow your command while his mind returns to his real interest; and the second you cease to