The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

under which are lumped the disorders of a great many sufferers, whose only common feature is that the workings of their minds are so different from those of other people, and so divorced from reality, that it is impossible or dangerous to try to carry on the business and the social intercourse of life with them.

Certain types of insanity recur over and over again; the science known as psychiatry has classified them, and the psychological and medical researches of the last half-century have helped materially in our understanding of them. In the Middle Ages the people we now label insane were thought of as possessed by good or, more usually, evil spirits. In the “Age of Reason,” the eighteenth century, they were thought to be suffering from a disease of the reason which put them beyond the pale of ordinary men and women. The claims of a society alone were recognized, and when the lunatics were loaded with chains and herded into filthy prisons, society congratulated itself on having done its duty. To-day, we realize that the insane person is a human being like ourselves ; his insanity may be the result of deficient heredity or some physical disease, or due to the abnormal exaggeration of some quite normal trait of human mind. Our treatment of them has correspondingly changed ; indeed, it is one of the ironies of our civilization that many lunatics, could they but have enjoyed all their life the attention and the healthy conditions of existence which they find in the asylum, would never have become mad.

Let us imagine that we are being taken round a big asylum, and that one of the medical staff is pointing out to us examples of the different main types of insanity and explaining their history and origins. Over and over again we shall be likely to think how easily we might have . overstepped the borderline of sanity in the same way ; how, but for accidents of heredity and circumstance, we might be the lunatics and they the normal human beings. Here we see a wretched man living the life of an imbecile and paralysed baby.1 He cannot move his limbs; his mind is a blank; control over his bodily functions has disappeared ; little remains of his behaviour but the almost reflex action of taking food when a spoon is put to his lips. The doctor iclls us that he will eventually lose even this faculty and will die of starvation unless fed

1 ‘These cases are taken from the works of Kraepelin,

Kretschmer, Jung, Bleuler, McDougall, and Bernard Hart.

by a stomach-tube ; but even so his nervous system will continue to disintegrate until he dies. He is suffering from a late stage of general paralysis of the insane. This is a sequel to infection with the germ of syphilis and its symptoms are general decay of body, and especially of brain and mind. About one in every fifteen asylum patients suffers from it.

Some two years ago our patient was healthy ; then he began to fail in the normal affairs of life; he forgot all the odds and ends he ought to attend to; his judgment grew impaired ; he thought he was rich, and began treating everyone with indiscriminate generosity. His capacity for doing simple arithmetic failed (long before his powers of general reasoning). His control, as well as his judgment, grew impaired ; he neglected all his duties in order to go to the races on every possible occasion, and began making the most absurd and ambitious collections. It was then his relatives had him put in the asylum. There he grew worse, until finally his delusions and_ his normal human desires disappeared one by one. You can watch his behaviour going to pieces as the spirochetes rot his brain. Finally, even the power of speech and the instinct to walk will disappear, and he will revert to the condition of a very dirty baby.

It is this condition which, as we have seen, may often be ameliorated and its further progress arrested by infecting the sufferer with malaria. It is an object-lesson in the interrelation of mind and body, and shows us how even when slow physical degeneration of nerve tissue is the prime cause of mental derangement, the mental architecture is broken down in the reverse order from that in which it was built up; the highest faculties go first, the simplest instincts and reflexes last. Higher control disappears early ; and its loss manifests itself equally in every sphere of mental life—the logical intellect refuses to work properly, repressed desires can manifest themselves in delusions, the capacity for decision and action is impaired.

Near by is another case of a baby’s behaviour in a grown-up body. And here, too, the prime cause is purely physical ; the condition is very different from that of the general paralytic because the patient has always been like this—his defects are congenital. He can understand a few easy words, but cannot speak himself; his behaviour is in every way grossly subnormal. If we were able to examine his brain-tissue after death, we would, in all probability,

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