Nervous Breakdowns and How to Avoid Them

by Charles David Musgrove

Diet and breakdowns.

I have dealt at considerable length with this question of diet, simply because it has such an important bearing on the subject of breakdowns. There is no single path that leads to breakdowns, the way thither is rather a tangled maze of paths, along which people stumble blindly until they suddenly find themselves at an impasse. Yet the point at which they first left the high road of health consists in most cases of a mistake or series of mistakes in regard to their food and the manner in which they take it.

The old style.

The digestive troubles of the present day are very different from those of a century ago. “The fine old English gentleman, one of the olden style,” consumed an enormous breakfast and a still more enormous dinner, washing down vast quantities of food with great draughts of beer or wine. Every now and then he was laid up with a stomach-ache or an attack of gout, and for a day or two made the welkin ring with his upbraidings; then he turned up again, as fresh as any young buck, and went on his way rejoicing until the next attack laid him by the heels.

We marvel that he survived to tell the tale. “I should be dead in a week if I did such things,” one of my readers probably remarks. Yes, but the hale old chap led a different sort of life from that which we lead to-day. He spent most of his time in the saddle or in walking about the country-side. Moreover, the food he ate was of such a solid nature that he was bound to chew it well before he could swallow it. And the bilious or gouty attacks from which he suffered afforded a welcome respite to the whole system, giving it the chance to throw off a large amount of deleterious matter.

The present style.

There is no comparison between such a process as this and the continued remorseless poisoning from which many people suffer in these days as a result of dietetic mistakes. And this poison finds an easy victim in the constitutions of to-day. These hearty blades of olden times did not impose much strain on their nervous systems. They lived nearer to Nature instead of cooping themselves up in offices and businesses, straining body and mind in the struggle to make a livelihood or a fortune. All the more reason why we should take infinitely more care in regard to our diet nowadays than our ancestors did.

At a dinner party some years ago one of the guests was a sallow, dyspeptic-looking individual, of a melancholy cast of countenance, and with nerves written in large characters all over him. In fact, the state of his nerves constituted the chief part of his conversation, to the utter boredom of the lady he had taken in to dinner.

It appeared that he was always tired and depressed, and could not make out why it was. He had taken tonics and gone for holidays to various health resorts, but had gained not the slightest benefit.

He might have obtained some glimmering of the truth if he had placed a mirror in front of him as he dined, or even if he had only stopped to think. For he ate rapidly, almost ravenously, of every course that was set before him, bolting it down with scarcely any attempt at mastication, which the present style of preparing food renders only too easy. “He was bound to make a good dinner,” he said, as his business was of such an arduous and worrying nature that he rarely had time to get any lunch. At the conclusion of the meal he apologised for taking out of his pocket a box of digestive tablets. He was forced to have them, he explained, as he was a martyr to dyspepsia.