The Saving Power of Will
It is not uncommon to hear a doctor say, “Nothing but his will pulled him through that time.” It does not mean quite what it says, for the patient’s will would have been helpless to cure him without the medicine and the treatment. But it does mean that in some cases when life is hovering on the brink, even the most skilful treatment cannot hold it back if the will to live is gone. The chances may be half and half. Lack of desire to live may drop the balance on the death side. Determination and hope and confidence may overweigh the life side. For the influence of will in refusing to surrender to depression may throw the needed hair’s weight in favor of more normal circulation. Depression and emotion may so effect the sympathetic nervous system as to cause a lowered circulatory activity. Determination, based on volition, may stimulate a response from the sympathetic system which will increase heart activity. And certainly, when it is not a matter of life and death, but a prolonged recovery, will is a saving grace. The patient who sets all his sick energies to the task of winning health reaches his goal quicker than the hopeless and depressed. Perhaps his will merely brings utter relaxation for the time, forces acceptance of present helplessness only for the sake of giving the body a better chance to recuperate; but the very fact that it is acting to hopefully carry out orders lightens by half the nurse’s task of getting him well; and she can encourage this will to co-operate with the doctor’s efforts by suggestion, by her directness and honesty, by the quiet assurance that at least a reasonable degree of health is won by effort.
We have touched upon only a few of the laws of the mind. The nurse can help develop saving mental habits and wholesome attitudes while she helps to strengthen sick bodies; she can make a cure a little more certainly lasting who will remember that:
- Adaptability is essential to life and health.
- There is no neurosis without a psychosis.
- Suggestion may be a powerful factor for health.
- What we attend to determines what we are.
- Thought substitution is possible.
- Habit is a conserver of effort.
- Will is a saving power.
CHAPTER VIII
VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES
Disorders and Perversions
Life would be a very simple proposition if the mental machinery always worked right. But this is peculiarly subject to damage both from without and from within. From without it may be damaged by the toxins of food, as in the acute toxic psychoses; by the poison of drink, as in the alcohol-produced psychoses, such as acute alcoholic hallucinosis; by lack of muscular exercise, resulting in a deficient supply of oxygen to burn up the accumulated toxins from energy-producing foods; by the infections, which may result in the infection-exhaustion psychoses; by wrong methods of education, and by surroundings which demand too severe a mental strain in the struggle toward adjustment. These damages from without we class roughly as environmental.
From within the mental workings may be injured by emotional dominance; by bad habits of thinking and feeling and doing—often the result of wrong methods of education; by defective heredity; by undeveloped will; by the insanities. These danger sources from within we might classify as self-produced and hereditary.
There may be disorders of any or every function of the intellect, disorders of feeling, and perversions of will. Some of the most commonly met we list below.