Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    332/356 (page 296)
    activity, never undergo any real development, after they have become skilled in the special work of their lives. Their thoughts run in a groove so well worn that the difficulty is to get out of it. The higher faculties being unused undergo decay, if not degeneration; real mental application becomes first difficult and then impossible; and when a calamity occurs they are without internal resources to enable them to bear up against its strain. When they are taken from the routine of their labours they have no interests, they can turn to no intellectual work, are a torment to themselves and to others, as they go through the tedious process of a decay of mind. The matter is worse when a person has made success in business the one aim of his life, when he has by long concentration of desire and energy upon such an aim so completely grown to it as to have made it the main part of his inner life—that to which all his thoughts, feelings, and actions are directed; then if some error of his own, or some misfortune beyond his control, shatters his hopes, destroys the pride of his previous accomplishments, lays low the fabric which he has been building with all the eagerness and energy of an intense egoism, he is left naked and defenceless against his afflictions, sinks into melancholy, and from melancholy into madness. To neglect the continued culture and exercise of the intellectual and moral faculties is to leave the mind at the mercy of external circumstances: with it as with the body, to cease to strive is to begin to die. If the foregoing remarks be true, it is obvious that