Nervous Breakdowns and How to Avoid Them

by Charles David Musgrove

What strength is.

The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, and the measure of man’s strength is that of the weak point in his constitution. He may have the frame and muscle of a Sandow, but if he has a faulty valve in his heart, it is by that, and not by his muscular development, that his strength must be gauged. Even supposing that every organ in his body is sound, and he is possessed of great powers of endurance, he cannot be called strong if he is impairing his digestion by careless habits of eating and drinking, or endangering his nervous system by habitually keeping late hours and burning the candle at both ends, or laying up gout in store for himself by gourmandising or want of exercise.

No matter whether the weak spot be in the man’s own system or in his mode of life, Nature will find it out as surely as the arrow found the heel of Achilles. It is on his weak points that he must stand or fall; it is in these that the strain will manifest itself, in other words, that the breakdown will appear.

The aim of this book has been to prevent matters ever reaching this stage, to arrest them at the outset. No sign, of all those I have indicated as pointing towards a breakdown, should be neglected. The time to take heed is when any man or woman finds that their powers of work are failing them, their nerves easily upset, or their minds assailed by an unreasonable dread of the future, or that in one or other of various ways they are not the people they were. It is better to slow down at the first danger signal than to run past one after another until we are pulled up with a crash.

Find out the weak points.

The first thing, therefore, is to find out the weak points; take care of these, and the strong ones will look after themselves. The man who taps the wheels of railway carriages does so in order to detect flaws; he passes by the sound wheels with indifference. And there is a simple way in which people may find out in which particulars they are going wrong. If they have taken the trouble to wade through this book, they may have noticed that certain paragraphs or chapters attracted their attention. It does not follow that they agreed with them, or thought them important at the time. It may be that they said (provided they were of the male gender) that they were “all nonsense,” or that it was “a precious lot of fuss about nothing.”

It does not matter what they said or thought. The point is that they said or thought something. For the fact that they did so was proof that the piece of writing in question forced itself upon their notice, and must therefore have had some special application to their own case; and if this has been so, let them pay particular heed to those paragraphs, or pages or chapters, whichever they may have been.

If the advice given is not in accordance with their own feelings, that fact does not detract from its value. Many of us, in looking back, have to acknowledge that most of the warnings and counsels which have proved of the greatest benefit in the long run, were unpalatable at the time. They were distasteful simply because we knew in our inmost hearts that we stood in need of them. Otherwise we should not have paid sufficient attention to them even to feel any resentment on the subject. There is a lot of meaning in the saying, “Greater truth, greater libel.”

Temperament.

Especially does this apply to the question of exercise and rest. It is not hard, as a rule, to convince people that they are committing errors of diet, or getting too little fresh air; but it is very different when we come to deal with these other matters. Few people like to be told that they should take more exercise, or rouse themselves to show more interest in things outside their ordinary routine of work. It sounds like an accusation of indolence.