| Summary: | "This lecture proposes to deal with human nature working under difficulties, and to choose one small portion of that broad problem. I should like to interest you in some facts rather than in words, in a sample of the real stuff of human life rather than in the traditional and threadbare phrases with which we too often disguise the actual world, giving ourselves a pleasing illusion of knowledge. I ask you, therefore, to consider our topic to be not "mental disorders," but men, women, and children in difficulty, suffering, hoping, thwarted, groping. Many people are suffering from a mental disorder, who in the current estimate of their friends are considered only as eccentric, model, disagreeable, extreme, wicked, virtuous, emancipated, etc. The same situation is met in regard to other disorders. In referring to a reaction as a mental disorder we do not necessarily mean that the condition is severe or serious. Mental disorders may be mild, just as physical disorders may be; mental indigestion may be of as many degrees as physical indigestion, and an emotional disturbance may be as mild as an attack of chicken-pox. Mental disorder may masquerade under many disguises, and human nature in difficulties may resort to many subtle evasions and modes of defense; we are so much under the spell of old-fashioned conceptions of human behavior that the real driving forces of the personality escape us, while we label behavior with the conventional ethical or social terms
There are a group of patients, of people who recognize that they are sick, and come to the physician for treatment; they admit that they have a disorder, but they are perhaps indignant at the suggestion that their trouble is mental. Their symptoms may have nothing mental about them, but may be the ordinary symptoms of respectable ailments; they come for their headache or dizziness or weakness, or they have palpitation or fainting attacks, or their digestive system is a source of much interest and annoyance, or they have indications that some of the other internal organs are out of gear. Yet these apparently simple symptoms may be of complex origin; they may be the outcroppings above the surface of important emotional reactions, only to be understood in the setting of these reactions. We have to discard our mediæval attitude toward these sick or handicapped people, and to study the problem which they present as a problem of human nature working under difficulties. We have to study the disordered behavior of the total organism in the same way in which we study the disordered behavior of a single organ. When we come to those far-reaching disorders of the personality in which the patient suffers from profound melancholy, or gives way to exuberant excitement, or is dominated by sounds or voices of subjective origin, or sees the world banded against him in a strange web of persecution, the principles of explanation so far utilized seem to leave us in the lurch. Neither structural damage, nor chronic poisoning of the brain, nor simple disorder of the instincts explains these specifically human disorders. A modern attitude to these ailments means that at the earliest indication of trouble, when treatment has most chance of being useful, these patients will be encouraged to seek advice, where there are available suitable facilities for diagnosis and treatment"--Book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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