NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS

Evening Star, Issue 19789, 13 February 1928, Page 4

NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS

In the minds of most of us the words “ nervous breakdown ” have a definite meaning (writes the medical correspondent of ‘The Times Engineering Supplement’). We picture the victim of over-work, or over-strain, reeling under the blows of a world which is too often difficult for him, and becoming, perhaps in a few months or weeks, total wreck. This picture is fanciful. Nervous breakdowns do not occur in that fashion. The hardest workers are the very people who seem to be least liable to suffer from them. As a general rule, indeed, the victim of a nervous breakdown has been afflicted with “nerves” for years before he finally hauls down his flag. # The last catastrophe is merely the most important of a long series of disasters. This fact deserves the attention of all those who may think or “ feel ” that they are likely to suffer from broken nerves. Because here, as elsewhere, a stitch in time saves nine. It is no use waiting for the final crash when by the exercise of a little precaution that crash can be avoided. Nervous feelings in the majority of instances are a symptom not of psychical but of physical illhealth. They occur constantly during illnesses of a great many different kinds, and they manifest themselves in a great many different ways. One of the commonest of such manifestations is bad temper. If a man feels that his temper is frayed he had better make up his mind that he is slightly ill, unless, indeed, there be good cause for the frayed temper. A visit to a doctor at this period may save a visit to a nursing Home a few months later. Indigestion is a fruitful source of nervous breakdowns, _ but the most fruitful source of all is certainly rheumatism. Rheumatic folk, in fact, are nearly all nervously unstable. If this fact were more generally recognised than it is, a great dea of troubc and sorrow would he avoided. Rheumatism may not be curable—probably it is not curable—but it _is most emphatically papabie of amelioration. And dryness

is a tried and trustworthy method of ameliorating it. . . • ' Wet feet brings on attacks of rheumatism, and attacks of rheumatism bring on “nerves.” And then there is diet. Give a rheumatic subject two big meat meals daily for six months, and he will break down almost as surely as the sun, rises. For some reason or other rheumatism unfits the body for the digestion of much meat. What the rheumatic person requires is light, easily digested food, eggs, milk, fish, and so on.