XXXII
"My heart's desire" is a true phrase. Since 1900, when my own breakdown
occurred, not fewer than one million men and women in the United States
alone have for like causes had to seek treatment in institutions,
thousands of others have been treated outside of institutions, while
other thousands have received no treatment at all. Yet, to use the
words of one of our most conservative and best informed psychiatrists,
"No less than half of the enormous toll which mental disease takes from
the youth of this country can be prevented by the application, largely
in childhood, of information and practical resources now available."
Elsewhere is an account of how my plan broadened from reform to cure,
from cure to prevention—how far, with the co-operation of some of this
country's ablest specialists and most generous philanthropists, it has
been realized, nationally and internationally, through the new form of
social mechanism known as societies, committees, leagues or
associations for mental hygiene.
More fundamental, however, than any technical reform, cure, or
prevention—indeed, a condition precedent to all these—is a changed
spiritual attitude toward the insane. They are still human: they love
and hate, and have a sense of humor. The worst are usually responsive
to kindness. In not a few cases their gratitude is livelier than that
of normal men and women. Any person who has worked among the insane,
and done his duty by them, can testify to cases in point; and even
casual observers have noted the fact that the insane are oftentimes
appreciative. Consider the experience of Thackeray, as related by
himself in "Vanity Fair" (Chapter LVII). "I recollect," he writes,
"seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicêtre,
near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his
imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave
a halfpennyworth of snuff in a cornet or 'screw' of paper. The kindness
was too much ... He cried in an anguish of delight and gratitude; if
anybody gave you and me a thousand a year, or saved our lives, we could
not be so affected."
A striking exhibition of fine feeling on the part of a patient was
brought to my attention by an assistant physician whom I met while
visiting a State Hospital in Massachusetts. It seems that the woman in
question had, at her worst, caused an endless amount of annoyance by
indulging in mischievous acts which seemed to verge on malice. At that
time, therefore, no observer would have credited her with the exquisite
sensibility she so signally displayed when she had become convalescent
and was granted a parole which permitted her to walk at will about the
hospital grounds. After one of these walks, taken in the early spring,
she rushed up to my informant and, with childlike simplicity, told him
of the thrill of delight she had experienced in discovering the first
flower of the year in full bloom—a dandelion, which, with
characteristic audacity, had risked its life by braving the elements of
an uncertain season.
"Did you pick it?" asked the doctor.
"I stooped to do so," said the patient; "then I thought of the pleasure
the sight of it had given me—so I left it, hoping that someone else
would discover it and enjoy its beauty as I did."
Thus it was that a woman, while still insane, unconsciously exhibited
perhaps finer feeling than did Ruskin, Tennyson, and Patmore on an
occasion the occurrence of which is vouched for by Mr. Julian
Hawthorne. These three masters, out for a walk one chilly afternoon in
late autumn, discovered a belated violet bravely putting forth from the
shelter of a mossy stone. Not until these worthies had got down on all
fours and done ceremonious homage to the flower did they resume their
walk. Suddenly Ruskin halted and, planting his cane in the ground,
exclaimed, "I don't believe, Alfred—Coventry, I don't believe that
there are in all England three men besides ourselves who, after finding
a violet at this time of year, would have had forbearance and fine
feeling enough to refrain from plucking it."
The reader may judge whether the unconscious display of feeling by the
obscure inmate of a hospital for the insane was not finer than the
self-conscious raptures of these three men of world-wide reputation.
Is it not, then, an atrocious anomaly that the treatment often meted
out to insane persons is the very treatment which would deprive some
sane persons of their reason? Miners and shepherds who penetrate the
mountain fastnesses sometimes become mentally unbalanced as a result of
prolonged loneliness. But they usually know enough to return to
civilization when they find themselves beginning to be affected with
hallucinations. Delay means death. Contact with sane people, if not too
long postponed, means an almost immediate restoration to normality.
This is an illuminating fact. Inasmuch as patients cannot usually be
set free to absorb, as it were, sanity in the community, it is the duty
of those entrusted with their care to treat them with the utmost
tenderness and consideration.
"After all," said a psychiatrist who had devoted a long life to work
among the insane, both as an assistant physician and later as
superintendent at various private and public hospitals, "what the
insane most need is a friend!"
These words, spoken to me, came with a certain startling freshness. And
yet it was the sublime and healing power of this same love which
received its most signal demonstration two thousand years ago at the
hands of one who restored to reason and his home that man of Scripture
"who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no,
not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and
chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters
broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and
day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting
himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and
worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to
do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the Most High God? I adjure Thee by
God, that Thou torment me not."
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