CHAPTER VII
PSYCHOLOGY AND HEALTH
In the use of its functions the mind manifests certain powers and certain modes of expression which can act as powerful allies or as damaging enemies of health. We speak of man as adaptable, but also as a being of habits. We speak of him as “feeling” when we wish to express the fact that his emotions influence his body. We expect of the average man a certain amount of suggestibility. We say that he is tremendously affected by his environment, which simply means that his attention, naturally centered chiefly on the things at hand, largely determines what he is. But we recognize that a man of trained mind can choose and will to substitute for his present surroundings thoughts upon more constructive things from past experience, or from future possibilities, or from within the mind’s own storehouse. His ability to largely modify his life by his will, we recognize as man’s greatest power. Adaptability, emotional response, suggestibility, attention, thought-substitution, habit-formation, and will can minister vitally to health, or can prove damaging avenues of disease.
Necessity of Adaptability
Adaptability is as essential to life of mind as to life of body; and health of mind as well as health of body is determined by the individual ability to adjust himself to environment.
There are dreamers who have lived in their ideal world so long that they cannot meet the stern realities of life when they come. The shock is too great for the mind that has accepted only the fantastic, the real as the dreamer would have it; and he lets go altogether his hold on the actual, accepting the would-be world as present fact. And we call him insane. Other visionaries wakened rudely to life as it is, accept it as unchangeable fate, lose all their true ideals and become cynical, or victims of utter depression for whom life holds nothing that matters. Still others go on through the years self-satisfied and serene because they simply refuse to believe unpleasant truths; they “pretend” that their wishes are realities, and acknowledge as facts only the pleasant things of existence. The first two groups have failed to adapt self to life as it is, and the mind is lost or so damaged as to no longer serve its body properly. The “pretenders” have adjusted themselves, and so long as they can remain happily self-deceived all goes well for them, though they complicate living for others. However, they have made an adaptation, a defective one, it is true, but one through which the mind may survive. Some of this class, however, finally build up a more and more elaborate system of self-deception until they, too, are insane.
The practically adaptable man can dream dreams, but always recognizes them as dreams, and can stop at will; can vision a beautiful ideal, but comprehends that it is not yet reality, though it may some time become so if he learns and fulfils the laws leading to its realization. The adaptable man or woman recognizes the real as fact, desirable or otherwise, the fantastic as unreal and only to be indulged in as a pastime, and the ideal as the possible, a thing for which to work and sacrifice. So perfect adaptability would mean perfect mental poise.
It is for the nurse to realize that the greater number of her patients do not belong to any of these classes absolutely, but that some of them have tendencies leading in these various directions. And it is her privilege to recognize the trend of her sick patient’s mental workings, and to so deftly and unobtrusively encourage the recognition of facts as things which are to be used—not as stumbling-blocks—that her mental nursing, as her physical, shall be directed toward health. She can help her patient to accept illness and suffering as realities to be faced, and treatment as a means, whether pleasant or not, of making it possible for health to replace them. The understanding nurse can actively help her charge one step at a time toward adaptation to the new environment, remembering that many of the sick, particularly the depressed, cannot be encouraged or incited to effort by having future health held out to them. They are capable only of living in the present and doubting all the future.
There Can Be No Neurosis Without a Psychosis.—If the brain is the organ of the mind, then what affects the brain must perforce be at least registered by mind. So every physical shock, accident, toxic condition, infection—even the ordinary cold—rouses the mind at least to awareness, usually to discomfort. For the nerve-cells and fibers—those inseparable parts of the body mechanism—speedily report the fact that they are being tampered with. In the toxicity of the infections these very delicate tissues are nourished by toxic fluids; in accidents they carry all the messages from the injured part. Then the brain—that center of all man’s reactions and the organ of all his consciousness—receives the report of the disturbance and translates it into terms of more or less disability. The neurosis has become a psychosis. The physical condition has become a mental discomfort. Normally this ensuing mind state should be in accordance with the extent of the injury to the nerve-cells and fibers. But under long-continued discipline, or influenced by emotion, the conscious mind may not recognize the neurosis; whereas, in the hypersuggestible, consciousness will translate it into entirely disproportionate suffering.
A great problem of nervous education is what the mind will do with discomfort or pain. Will it put all its attention there and respond with nervousness, irritability, demand for sympathy; or will it relegate all the minor pains to their own little places, accepted as facts but to be disregarded except in so far as actual treatment is needed? Will it turn to attend to the host of other more desirable objects? Or in case of acute suffering, will it take it as a challenge to endurance? Will it use it as a means to strengthen volition, as a stepping-stone to self-mastery?