The second class of nervous girls is that in which the members are nervous when talking to friends as well as to strangers. This is the most numerous class of all. This form of nervousness is sometimes due to indigestion or other derangements of health. It is to this class that we shall more especially refer when considering the treatment of nervousness.
That form of nervousness in which the sufferer is perfectly at ease in the excitement of a crowded room but who cannot endure to talk with one person alone is a comparatively rare condition. It is typically met with in cases of nervous exhaustion. It is tolerably common in persons who have just recovered from some forms of depressing diseases.
The fifth class contains two very distinct groups of cases. There are many people who are distressed in a crowded place. Many persons who are not feeling up to the mark are often depressed and get a headache in a crowded place, even where there is no noise or conversation going on. This is a form of nervousness that is almost exclusively met with in elderly or middle-aged persons.
It is in the second of the groups of people who are nervous in large assemblings that we see the most advanced grades of self-consciousness. We have seen girls in drawing-rooms, at concerts, and even in church, suffering from this malady (for though it appears as vanity or self-conceit, it is neither one nor the other, but a true disease). They shift about, looking from one person to another, wondering what the various members of the assembly are thinking about them. If anyone happens to turn his glance in the direction of a girl with this form of nervousness, a regular outburst occurs; she blushes and perspires profusely, putting her hand up to her hat or fringe or rearranging some part of her dress, wondering what can be a amiss, or she wipes her nose with her handkerchief, thinking that there must be a smut there to cause the unknowing agitator to turn round and look at her. It will never strike her that the unwelcome gaze of the stranger is purely accidental, or may be excited by the elegance of her dress or person. No, there must be something “funny” for anybody to turn round and stare at her like that!
The two last divisions of nervousness need but little comment. They are due to bodily ill-health and are part and parcel of physical weakness.
We must now turn to the most important and most difficult part of our task—the description of the means by which these various forms of nervousness may be overcome. We have several times mentioned that many forms of nervousness are commonly caused by ill-health, and we may now state that all forms are rendered worse by any departure from physical health. It is therefore obvious that if the sufferer is anæmic or has indigestion, or any of the other ten thousand diseases to which we poor humans are subject, it is essential that the unhealthy state of her body should be cured ere she should try the special methods of treatment to cure herself of nervousness.
As nervousness is so frequently the result of a one-sided education and lack of experience, we would expect that persons who have secured a varied tuition would be less subject to nervousness than their less widely but perhaps more deeply educated sisters. And this we find to be the case. It is a knowledge of a wide scope of learning, of the little ins and outs of our very elaborate social customs, of a more or less superficial knowledge of current views and events, which will help a girl to be at home in society, rather than a deep knowledge of any one subject. This is the proper place to point out that the popular idea that nervousness is due to a feeble intelligence is totally untrue. It requires a considerable amount of mental power to be able to be nervous. Some of the greatest men in history have been conspicuously nervous.
The girl who rapidly falls in with social customs, who can join in conversations on the ordinary subjects of talk, and who can grasp and retain the little ways of society which she cannot fail to observe, need never fear of retaining any temporary nervousness she may have experienced when she first “came out.”
Since experience is so antagonistic to nervousness, it follows that the pursuit of experience is a very necessary point in the treatment of nervousness. Of all ways of acquiring experience none can equal travelling; for the experience gained by moving from place to place is exceedingly varied, and it is this varied experience that is needed to cure nervousness.
Often when nervousness is so intractable that it cannot be cured by other means, we advise the subjects to leave society for a year or two, to travel, if possible, or else to gain an insight into the ways and working of the world before again attempting to face the terrors of social life.