CHAPTER XIV

MALADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

The classification of diseases was carried out at a time when the body was regarded as the whole of man and the mind looked upon as an unimportant by-product whose influence was negligible. Modern discovery, however, has radically changed our outlook.

Much mental disease has a physical origin and should not be classified as mental at all. To this class belong the mental disturbances arising from disease of or injury to the brain; womb trouble; poisoned blood conditions and the faulty functioning of the ductless glands, whose place in our economy is so important and so little understood; and many other causes of a like nature.

Setting aside this type of disease, with which psychology, strictly speaking, is not concerned, we find the true mental diseases fall into a first broad division, those which are congenital and those which are acquired. In congenital disease an abnormal individual breaks down in a normal environment, and in acquired disease a normal individual breaks down in an abnormal environment. In both cases the results are the same, but treatment and prospect of recovery are very different.

The boundary line between a healthy and diseased mind is not easy to draw, but we may reckon a mind diseased when it fails to react normally to its environment; thus, if happenings which should stir us deeply leave us unmoved, or we are upset by things which should have no power to disturb us, we may consider our mind is not working well. Let it never be forgotten, however, that mental disturbance ranges from irritability, depression, and bad memory, to its extreme manifestations in the different forms of insanity.

The division between nervous and mental disease is even harder to draw, but for all practical purposes the sense of reality may be utilised as a dividing line; as soon as he loses his sense of reality a man passes the boundary line of insanity. The neurotic knows that there is something wrong with him, but that the world is all right; the lunatic believes that he is all right, but that there is something wrong with the world.

It is the constant aim of the mind to maintain harmonious relations between the individual and the environment; to secure an adjustment to, and to make the best of, the constantly varying conditions to which the organism is subjected. If it fails to do this, the law of the survival of the fittest comes into action and automatically eliminates the unfit--those who have failed to adapt themselves to the conditions in which they live. Failure to adapt may be due to one of two causes: the individual may be abnormal, or the environment may be abnormal.

Modern social conditions in a civilised community tend to prevent the automatic elimination of the unfit and to permit them to live on. With physical failure to adapt, due to malformation or lack of stamina, we will not deal here, but will confine ourselves to the problem of adjustment on the mental level.

If there is difficulty in making a mental adjustment to environment and finding contentment and peace of mind, then the individual is faced by a peculiar problem, he is allowed to continue his physical life, but cannot find mental peace. In order to obtain relief from this intolerable condition, certain devices are unconsciously resorted to. These devices are of the nature of buffers or shock absorbers, and provided the individual does not deviate too much from the normal type, which is adapted to the environment, and that the environment likewise does not differ too much from the type for which the individual was designed, then these devices effectually protect his feelings from the rude shocks of circumstances and enable him to keep his poise and peace of mind.

If, however, the strain thrown upon the psychic shock absorber is too great for it adequately to absorb, then the rebound of the buffer-springs throws the machinery of the mind out of gear and makes itself felt in nervous and mental disorders. Like physical disease, mental disease is Nature’s effort at repair which overreaches itself.

This, then, is what constitutes mental disease (the organic insanities being excluded from this definition)--the reaction of the mind to what it cannot assimilate. It must not be thought, however, that mental disorder necessarily means insanity. Any faulty functioning of the mind comes under the heading of psycho-pathology, and just as the diseases of the body range from a passing indisposition to some fatal organic disease, so the diseases of the mind range from irritability and forgetfulness to the complete collapse of lunacy.