Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/64

60 fact that misfit, inadequacy and failure cause so many people to suffer from an inhibition of the powers of right perspective, and to such an extent that they necessarily come, in time, if slowly yet most surely, to the point where they can not see the comparative virtue of the strength they still have, and the work they still can do, even as they think upon and especially feel upon so uncomfortably, what they originally expected of themselves in the great battle of life.

From these and many another supporting observation, easily and everywhere to be had, it is perfectly legitimate to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that mental pain and its resulting invalidism is quite naturally the necessary outcome of a great variety of causes, which may be contributed to, usually, by almost every influence that either bad heredity, accident, disease, wrong education, personal over-stress, or failure, or future uncertainty, may happen to afford. Besides, in many instances, we may unhesitatingly believe that these causes may be almost viciously, if never so unwittingly, supplemented by parents, children, relatives far and near, neighbors and friends, clergymen and physicians, gossips, fools and scandal-mongers, and all others who may as potently as unwittingly conspire to produce and prolong it. Moreover, we may note that there often exists constitutionally, or that there has been developed through disease or accident, certain definite phases of an imperative tendency toward an abnormal sensitiveness to every painful or unusual impression, so much so that when this comes to be actually coupled with an over-developed fear of consequences, it may most unexpectedly make the sufferer all too ready to fall in with almost every possible kind of trend toward this form of invalidism, and to gradually become most thoroughly a coward, or even quite panicstricken, from the very first suggestion of subsequent trouble. That with such a constitution and with such a "push" from untoward influences of so many kinds, every temporary attack of mental pain, from no matter how insignificant a cause, may help the sufferer eventually to slide into the chronic state of mental disease, especially when day by day serious measures for relief are unsuccessful, is plainly beyond question. Thus, a pain in the back, not overcome by sufficiently strenuous or prolonged measures, may quite as easily become evidence of "spinal disease," as pain nearer the front may become a surety of "ovarian cyst"; or higher up, of "cancer of the stomach"; or at the back of the head, of "disease of the brain." And once let such a wrong notion become fixed in the mind, especially of both patient and attendants, as it often does, and then be reinforced by reference to it, or by any set of persistent untoward circumstances, as all too often is the case, temporary or permanent disease of mind may follow, in the natural course of events, as surely as night the day, and with scarcely ever a bright morning in prospect.