In cases like this the exaggeration proves the counterfeit.  Nobody could have been so down and out physically without dying.  The exaggeration secures attention and gives the little satisfaction to the natural desires which are denied expression, and which gain an outlet through habit along the lines previously worn by the real disease.  Many a person is still suffering from an old pain or an old disability whose cause has long since disappeared, but which is stamped on the mind and believed in as a present reality.  Since the sensation is as real as ever, it is sometimes very hard to believe that it is not legitimate, but if the person is intelligent, a little explanation and re-education usually suffices.

=Twenty Years an Invalid.= Mr. S., from Ohio, had spent much of his time for twenty years going from one sanatorium to another.  There was scarcely a health resort in the country with which he was not familiar.  The day he came to me he felt himself completely exhausted by the two-block walk from the car.  He explained that he could scarcely listen to what I was saying because his brain was so fagged that concentration was impossible.  When asked to read a book, he dramatically exclaimed, “Books and I have parted company!” I set him to work reading “Dear Enemy” but it was not a week before he was devouring the deeper books on psychology, in complete forgetfulness of the pains in his head.  Playing golf and walking at least six miles every day, he rejoiced in a new sense of strength in his body, which for twenty years he had considered “used up.”  He is now doing a man-sized job in the business and philanthropic life of his home city.

=Brain-fag.= This feeling of brain-fag is one of the commonest nervous symptoms; and almost always it is supposed to be the result of intellectual overwork.  Some people who easily accept the idea that physical work cannot cause nervous breakdown can scarcely give up the deep-rooted notion that intense mental work is harmful.  Intellectual effort does give rise to fatigue in exactly the same way as does physical exertion, but the body takes care of the waste products of the one just as it does those of the other.  Du Bois says that out of all his nervous cases he has not found one which can be traced to intellectual overwork.  I can say the same thing, and I know no case in all the literature of the subject whose symptoms I can believe to be the result of mental labor.

The college students who break down are not wrecked by intellectual work.  In some cases, one strong factor in their undoing is the strain and readjustment necessary because of the discrepancies between some of their deepest religious beliefs and the truth as they learn it in the class-room.  The other factors are merely those which play their part in any neurosis.