He lacks initiative, and whatever course he is forced to take—after much indecision—he is convinced, a moment later, it would have been wiser to have taken the opposite one.
All his acts are done inattentively. He goes to his room for something, but has forgotten what when he gets there; later, he wonders if he locked the drawer, and goes back to see. At night he gets up to make sure he bolted the door, put out the gas, and damped the fire.
Regret for the past, dissatisfaction with the present, and anxiety for the future are plagues common to most people, but they become acute in a neurasthenic, who reproaches himself with past shortcomings of no moment, infuriates himself over to-day's trivialities, and frets himself over evils yet unborn.
Such a patient is often greatly upset by a trifle, yet little affected by a real shock, which by its very severity arouses his reactive faculties which lay dormant and left him at the mercy of the minor event. He will fret over a farthing increase in the price of a loaf, but if his bank fails he sets manfully to.
Duty that should be done to-day he leaves to be shirked to-morrow; he is easily discouraged, timid, and vacillating. Extremely self-conscious, he thinks himself the observed of all observers. If others are indifferent toward him, he is depressed; if interested, they have some deep motive; if grave, he has annoyed them; if gay, they are laughing at him; the truth, that they are minding their own business, never occurs to him, and if it did, the thought that other people were not interested in him, would only vex him.
He is extremely irritable (slight noises make him start violently), childishly unreasonable, wants to be left alone, rejects efforts to rouse him, but is disappointed if such efforts be not made, broods, and fears insanity. The true melancholic is convinced he himself is to blame for his misery; it is a just punishment for some unpardonable sin, and there is no hope for him in this world or the next. The neurasthenic, on the contrary, ascribes his distress to every conceivable cause save his own personal hygienic errors.
A neurasthenic, if epileptic, fears a fit will occur at an untoward moment. He dreads confined or, maybe, open spaces, or being in a crowd. When he reaches an open space (after walking miles through tortuous byways in an endeavour to avoid it) he becomes paralysed by an undefinable fear, and stops, or gets near to the wall.
He fears trains, theatres, churches, social gatherings, or the office.
Other victims fear knives, canals, firearms, gas, high places, and railway tracks, when the basic fear is of suicide. Many patients have sudden impulses—on which the attention is focussed with abnormal intensity—to perform useless, eccentric, or even criminal actions; to count objects, to touch lamp-posts,