Nervous Breakdowns and How to Avoid Them

by Charles David Musgrove

Or it may be that he has struggled through laborious days and nights and amid many disappointments for fame. Just as he is about to realise his ambitions he breaks down, and becomes an embittered misanthrope. The genius which has enabled him to climb so many rungs of the ladder becomes inert, and he cannot mount the last step.

Another spends his life in a good cause—philanthropy, religion, public work of any sort. At the very time when, by the experience he has gained, his years of greatest usefulness stretch before him, he is cut off, incapacitated by nervous debility.

And it is not only men who go through this experience; the same may befall women. Often has it happened that a woman has devoted herself so assiduously to the care of her family, regardless of her own disturbed meals and broken rest, that just when her children needed her most of all—and that is when they were growing up—her strength has failed her and she has become an invalid.

The lamentable part about breakdowns is the fact that they attack those who can least be spared. It is not the clodhopper, the navvy or the labourer, the careless or the incompetent, who suffer from them. On the contrary, we meet with them among skilled workmen, business men of the greatest ability, professional men of the highest acumen and experience. The former can be replaced, whilst these others have carved a niche for themselves which no one else can fill.

It is the natures of finest fibre which accomplish the most, and it is they who are most liable to give way beneath the strain. A common mug may fall to the ground unharmed, where a piece of costly china would be smashed to atoms. When a masterpiece of art is lost or stolen, the whole nation grieves after it. How much more so when a man of repute, either in great ways or small, is invalided and his services lost to the world.

The problem of the day.

There is no doubt that breakdowns constitute one of the most momentous problems of the day. We hear of them on all hands, in different guises and under various terms. Go into any company you like, and it is safe to say that before many minutes have passed matters of health will be under discussion, and oftentimes they are nerves or breakdowns in some form or other.

It is only natural, perhaps, that this should be so. Yet too frequently the only result of these aimless conversations is to accentuate suffering, instead of leading to the acquisition of any useful information which might help to relieve it. Unfortunately, the general public seems to have made up its mind that nervous disorders are an inevitable concomitant of modern life. They fear them just as they fear influenza, wondering who will be the next to be attacked.

Yet there is no comparison between the two complaints. For the one is due to a germ which pounces upon the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the thoughtful and the careless, with absolute impartiality; whilst the other is brought about by a number of conditions, all associated with our mode of life, for which we are responsible, and over which we have a vast amount of control.

Influenza comes like a bolt from the blue, attacking its victims with disconcerting suddenness. To be sure, breakdowns may appear, in many cases at least, to come in a fell swoop; but what seems so abrupt and unlooked for is usually the climax to a long-continued process of undermining, like the collapse of a house, which has succumbed to the ravages of time. Yet the events which have led up to it may have been spread over a large number of years.