"You, practical! you, a business man! Why, you never had a serious thought in your life until now--at least not since you were a lad in the country.... Since boyhood you have never given a serious thought to health, home, wife, children, education, art, science, racial progress, or to the high destiny of man. You are simply a collector of money for its own sake, with no appreciation of what it might represent if you were really serious and really a business man or man of affairs. There are many like you in our asylum wards, where they are known as chronic maniacs. Here is one who collects bits of glass, old corks, and pieces of string. There sits another with a lap full of pebbles, twigs and straws."
Courtney (in Pyle's "Personal Hygiene") says, "The brain is an organ which, under proper training, is capable of performing an immense amount of work, provided only that the work is of a varied character and does not produce a corresponding amount of mental disquietude. The importance of the emotions, especially the depressing emotions such as grief, anxiety, and worry, as factors in the brain exhaustion, cannot easily be overestimated."
The obvious corollary to this proposition is that the constitutional worrier is likely to break down under an amount of work which produces no such effect upon the average normal individual.
The only quarrel I have with the name neurasthenia is that it diverts attention from the real condition oftenest to be treated, namely, the faulty mental tendency, and directs attention to an assumed debility which may or may not exist. Misdirected energy, rather than weakness, is the difficulty with one who is ready and anxious to walk miles to satisfy a doubt, or to avoid crossing an open square, and who will climb a dozen flights of stairs rather than be shut up in an elevator. Even the exhaustion that follows long attention to business is quite as often due to worry and allied faulty mental habits as to the work itself. In most cases the phobias, the doubts, and the scruples, instead of being the result of breakdown, must be counted among its principal causes.
This is why simple rest and abstinence from work so often fail to accomplish the cure that should follow if the exhaustion were due simply to overwork. In the "neurasthenic" rest from work only redoubles the worries, the doubts and the scruples, and the obsession to improve his time only adds to his nervous exhaustion. If a European trip is undertaken, the temperament responsible for the original breakdown causes him to rush from gallery to gallery, from cathedral to cathedral, so that no moment may be lost. Not infrequently it so happens that the patient returns more jaded than ever.