[312 Mothers’ remedies]

Insanity is most Prevalent among the Working Classes.—­Our factories, shops and stores frequently employ the young of both sexes and they are overtaxed by day and night and they become feeders of our hospitals for the insane.  Another cause is forced education in the young.  Our present school system tends to break down the body.  The work may not be too hard, but the amount of anxiety and worry, which this work causes in the minds of sensitive children, tends to enfeeble them.  Many children are sensitive, with nervous temperaments, and they are easily affected by the strain of mental toil.  Delicate children should be kept in the open air and their physical condition should be considered more than their mental.  Girls, especially, at the age of puberty, should be built up instead of rushed through a heavy routine of study.  Herbert Spencer says:  “On old and young the pressure of modern life puts a still increasing strain.  Go where you will, and before long there comes under your notice cases of children, or youths of either sex, more or less injured by undue study.”  Here, to recover from a state of debility thus produced, a year’s vacation has been found necessary.  There you will find a chronic congestion of the brain that has already lasted many months and threatens to last much longer.  Now you hear of a fever that has resulted from the over excitement, in some way, brought on at school.  And, again, the instance is that of a youth who has already had to desist from his studies, and who, since he has returned to them is frequently taken out of his class in a fainting fit.

Social pleasure also tends to weaken the system of parents who produce nervous and weakened children.  Another great cause of insanity is the unnatural, improper and excessive use of the sexual organs, and diseases that often come from indiscriminate sexual relations.  General paresis is very often caused by specific disease.  I might go on and enlarge upon these causes, but enough has been written to give warning to those who are breaking nature’s laws.

Classification.—­There are many classifications.  I will mention only the leading names, such as Melancholia, Mania.  Dementia, General Paresis.

Melancholia (Sad Mania).—­Melancholia is a disease characterized by great mental depression.

Causes—­Predisposition, physical disease, dissipation, work and worry, shock, brooding.  In simple melancholia the mildest attack may be called the “blues.”

Acute melancholia.—­Is generally the result of some mental shock.

Chronic melancholia is the end of all other forms of mental depression.  All these have their own peculiar manifestations and need a special line of treatment.