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CAN YOU CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS ?
Family Quarrels.
Have you ever quarrelled with someone you love? Have you ever felt so
irritated with your child that you felt like throwing him out? Have you ever
felt so hurt by an injustice done to you at work that you felt like resigning and
yet you couldn't? After any of these situations have you felt a bitterness and
misery inside you, almost unbearable and indescribable which made you sick of
life, unable to face your friends, made you angry and yet frustrated, and unable
to effect a solution? Have you experienced the terrible longing for comfort and
sympathy in such a situation, the wonderful joy to find someone who seems able
to understand you, who can calm you down and sooth your nerves; and have
you experienced the dreadful sensation bordering on panic when that comfort
is denied you and you are at your wits end to know which way to turn?
Mental Illness.
If you have been through this you have been mentally ill. It might only
have lasted one or two days or it might have gone on for weeks or months. A
cold in the head will last a few days; tuberculosis will last months or years. If
we could prevent colds in the head or tuberculosis it would be a wonderful
achievement in preventive medicine. But if we could prevent mental illness
it would be a still mightier achievement, for there is more mental illness in the
population, more hospital beds occupied by persons mentally ill than for all
other diseases put together.
It is not only inside the mental hospitals that there is need for medical
science to be applied to the prevention and care of mental illness. For mental
illness is to a large extent either a mal-development or arresting of emotional
development, or a reversion to a more immature level after satisfactory development.
I believe that we can do a great deal to prevent a large amount of mental
illness, some of which afflicts all of us sometime in our lives, if we all learn a
bit about it and try to understand why we act in certain ways—-sometimes
steadily, sometimes emotionally, sometimes childishly, sometimes foolishly.
The Angry Letter.
A woman acquaintance came to see me recently. Her opening remark
was "I must tell somebody about this trouble." She showed me a letter from
the wife of her husband's brother Tom. I have rarely read a more scurrilous,
virulent, malignant attack; in language bordering on the obscene, Tom's wife
called my friend mean, ungrateful, spiteful and scheming. The letter read
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