Causes of Insanity

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CAUSES OF INSANITY.

There is often better mental food in a beefsteak than in a book—the mind partakes of the body's health or sickness—whatever weakens one weakens the other, whatever strengthens one strengthens the other. The main root of insanity is defect of nutrition, often a depression caused by personal privation; it never is a strength of fury added to good health: its wildest paroxysm is, so to speak, the agony of a mind upon which its house of the flesh falls torturing and crushing, after its foundations have been loosened. Insanity is not the immaterial disease of an immaterial essence, but the perverted action of the mind caused by a defective instrument. Whatever helps to put the body into good physical condition does something towards the repair of the defective instrument.

Drunkenness begets insansity not by excitement. It is the stage of reaction and depression to which reason succumbs. The drunkard also turns from his meat, and by the substitution of a drink that contains few elements of nourishment for a great part of the solid sustenance by which alone the body can be nourished, he secures a double risk. He really starves his body while he also spoils his powers of digestion; thus secures, in an extreme form, the defect of nutrition that throws open the gate by which madness usually enters. At the same time, he struggles to pull in his madness through the gate so opened, by taking that which continually forces his mind into fits of unhealthy depression. Thus, an excess of intoxicating drink is maddening; but the madness of the excited drunkard is not the direct begetter of insanity. That comes of the next consequent depression working on a mind in an ill-nourished body. Theologians, even in comparatively modern times, regarded insanity as a spiritual rather than a physical malady.—Luther¹ said, "Idiots are men in whom devils have established themselves; and all the physicians who heal those infirmities as if they proceeded from natural causes are ignorant block heads, who know nothing about the powers of the demon. Eight years ago I myself saw and touched at Dessau a child of this sort, which had no human parents, but had proceed from the devil." This idea, however, has ceased to form a part of anybody's creed.

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