The automobile ride, the drive, and, best of all, the ride on horseback, will often serve to banish the vapors. Many neglect these methods, not from lack of time or money, but from indisposition.
A busy professional man recently assured me that he had renewed his youth by going three times a week to the gymnasium and joining the "old man's class." Here is an opportunity open to practically everyone; it is a desirable practice if continued. The drawback is the lack of incentive when the novelty has passed. Such incentive is furnished by the fad, in the satisfaction of gaining new knowledge and broadening the thought-associations.
Submit to what is unavoidable, banish the impossible from the mind, and look around for some new object of interest in life.
In the treatment of faulty mental habits the chief reliance is the training of the mind; physical measures are merely supplementary. This fact has always been recognized in a general way. The need of such training was emphasized by Epictetus thus:
"Not to be disappointed of our desire, nor incur our aversion. To this ought our training be directed. For without vigorous and steady training, it is not possible to preserve our desire undisappointed and our aversion unincurred."
But there has always been an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with purely mental treatment, and a desire for the drug, which has more than once, doubtless, been prescribed for the purpose of "suggestion" only.
The movement for psychic treatment on scientific principles, of faulty mental disorders, not of organic nature, is well under way. That the American profession takes an active interest in this movement is shown by the exhaustive paper on psycho-therapy by Dr. E. W. Taylor, recently read at a combined meeting held in Boston and discussed by such representative neurologists as Drs. Mills, Dercum, J. K. Mitchell, and Sinkler, of Philadelphia; Drs. Dana, Sachs, Collins, Hunt, Meacham, and Jelliffe, of New York; Dr. White of Washington, and Drs. Putnam and Prince, of Boston.
Such faulty mental habits as worry and obsession, doubting folly, and hypochondria, are no more amenable to physical treatment than the habit of swearing, or of over-indulgence in food and drink. Even the psychic treatment, by another, of such disorders, as of such habits, labors under the disadvantage that all attempts to influence another by exhortation, ridicule, or reproach are met by active or passive resistance on the part of the individual toward whom these efforts are directed. A conscientious resolve on the part of the individual himself, whether started by a casual hint or by a new line of thought, is often more effective than any amount of outside pressure, however well directed.