Chapter 5 Section 3 Causes of Insanity

In the complicated modern society, only those who can maintain inner peace will not become crazy. The biggest mistake doctors make is that they only treat physical diseases while ignoring mental diseases.In fact, the spirit and the body are one, how can they be separated! The famous Dr. Mei Yu claimed that more than half of the beds in the hospital are people with mental illness.However, when their nerves were examined by the most modern methods under a powerful microscope, most of them were found to be very healthy.Obviously, their "nervous problems" are not caused by any abnormalities in the nerves themselves, but are caused by negative emotions such as pessimism, irritability, anxiety, worry, fear, and depression.Plato once said: "The biggest mistake doctors make is that they only treat physical diseases, but ignore mental diseases. In fact, the spirit and the body are one, how can they be separated!"

It took 2,300 years for the medical community to understand this truth, and now it is beginning to develop a new medicine, namely "psychophysiological medicine", which is used to treat both the mind and the body at the same time.Modern medicine has brought under control diseases caused by horrific bacteria—such as smallpox, cholera, malaria, and others—that have claimed the lives of millions.But medicine is not yet capable of treating psychophysiological ailments that are not caused by germs, but by emotional worries, fears, hatreds, irritability, and despair.The devastation caused by this emotional disease is growing, spreading, and happening with astonishing speed.

Doctors estimate that one in 20 Americans is currently mentally ill at some point.One out of every six young Americans called up in World War II was unable to serve because of insanity. Why do people become insane?No one has all the answers, but fear and anxiety are most likely the cause in most cases.Anxiety and irritability make people unable to adjust themselves in the real world. They gradually cut off all relations with the surrounding environment and retreat into their own fantasy world to escape their worries. The Enemy of Self by Dr. Carl Manninger is a book about worry.The book doesn't tell you how to overcome worry, but it reveals some scary facts about how people unconsciously harm their physical and mental health with worries, irritability, hatred, regret and other emotions.You can find this book in the library.

Worry can make the strongest man sick.General Grant discovered this in the days leading up to the end of the American Civil War. General Grant's troops had besieged Richmond for more than nine months, and by this time General Lee's troops, the Confederate general, were disheveled, starved, and beaten.The whole army was demoralized, some soldiers held prayer meetings in their tents - crying and screaming, others had visions.Seeing that the war was coming to an end, General Lee's men set fire to the cotton and tobacco warehouses in Richmond, as well as the arsenal, and then fled the city overnight while the flames were rising.Grant's troops took advantage of the victory and pursued, attacking the Confederate Army from the left, right and rear. The cavalry blocked the supply line again.

Grant, half-blind from a severe headache, was unable to keep up with the procession and stopped at a farmhouse. "I spent the night there," Grant later wrote in his memoirs, "soaking my feet in hot water with mustard and applying mustard ointments to the joints and nape of my neck, hoping No more headaches the next morning." The next morning, the headache really didn't hurt.But that had nothing to do with the mustard, it was a cavalryman who brought a letter of surrender from General Lee. "When the officer with the letter arrived at the farmhouse," Grant wrote, "I still had a terrible head ache, but I was healed immediately after reading the letter."

Clearly, Grant's headaches were caused by worry, nervousness, and emotional distress.Once he regained his emotional self-confidence and thought of victory, he recovered from his illness immediately. Seventy years later, Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury, found that worry made him dizzy.He wrote in his diary, "When President Roosevelt bought 4.4 million bushels of wheat in one day in order to raise the price of wheat, he was very worried and anxious." He also wrote, "Before this matter comes to fruition, I feel dizzy every day, and after lunch I have to go home and rest for two hours."

If I want to know what worry does to a person, I don't have to go to the library or ask the doctor. I can just sit at home and look out the window, and I can see someone on the street suffering from anxiety. Crashes, and the owner of a family who became diabetic from worry—sugar levels in his blood and urine spiked when stocks fell. Psychologist William James said: "God may forgive our mistakes, but our own nervous system does not." Here's a startling and unbelievable fact: More people die by suicide each year than are killed by the five most common infectious diseases. Why is this so?The answer is "because of worry".

When some cruel victors tortured their captives, they used to bind the hands and feet of the captives and put them under a bag that dripped water day and night.The water droplets kept falling on the head, which sounded like a cone after a cone - and it always drove people crazy in the end.This grueling punishment was used in the Spanish Civil War and in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany under Hitler's rule. Worry is like water that keeps dripping, and that dripping, dripping, dripping water often drives people into a state of insanity and even suicide. When I was a country boy in Missouri, I used to be terrified to death by hearing descriptions of hellfires in church.But the pastor never mentioned that the fear and anxiety caused by purgatory are the physical and mental costs that have to be paid now.If you worry for a long time, you will one day get the most painful disease, angina pectoris.

If a person really got that disease, he would definitely scream out loud in pain.Compared with human screams, Dante's "Inferno" sounds like a "children's toy garden".At that point, you'll be saying to yourself, "Oh, God! If it's going to make me better, I'll never worry about anything again—never." do you love lifeDo you want to live a long and healthy life?Here's how you can do it.I quote Dr. Alexis Currier: "In the complicated modern society, only those who can maintain inner peace will not become neurotic." Can you maintain your inner peace amidst the chaos of the modern city?If you are a normal person, the answer should be "yes" and "absolutely".Most of us are actually stronger than we realize.We have many inner powers that have never been discovered, as Thoreau wrote in his immortal masterpiece: "I firmly believe that a man's life is controlled by his conscious power - if a man can confidently move in the direction of his ideal Work hard, make up your mind to live the life he wants to live, and he will achieve the success of his dreams."