The Pursuit Of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness and the striving toward mental health are both good things so long as we recognize that this is an ideal goal not a routine achievement. A realistic atti­tude is summed up in the anecdote of an an­cient king in the Orient who commanded his wise men to write him the briefest possible history of the world. They boiled the immense story down to five volumes, then one volume, then one chapter, then one paragraph. Still the king was not satisfied He demanded a single sentence short enough to be engraved on a ring. This, finally, was it: "Man is born, suffers, dies."

The mentally healthy person has learned to live with the inevitable frustrations of human existence, but they do not disenchant him from continuing the struggle. He accepts the fact that human beings will make mistakes so long as they keep trying. He keeps his toler­ance for frustration, disappointment, and grief at a high level. He also realizes that the ancient Socratic doctrine, "Know thyself," is at the heart of mental health but that it is a hard doctrine to apply.

If one really knows himself, he knows his own weaknesses, shortcomings, and failures. Yet the humility to accept these shortcomings is rare. Dr. Karl Menninger has put it this way "That curious emotional defense which impels some people to believe themselves ex­empt from all failure, from all weakness, from the taboo of 'abnormality,' is perhaps the greatest enemy of healthy-mindedness"

Toward Conscious Control of Unconscious Forces

Human beings certainly do have the power to think and reason and to govern their ac­tions, within limits, by the higher faculties of the mind. There have been "schools" of phi­losophy which have exalted man's reason and have implied that mankind could attain Utopia through the exercise of reason. But it has always been sensed, and twentieth-century research in psychiatry and psychology has clearly demonstrated that human conduct is never completely reasonable. Motives for conduct are always a mixture of conscious thought and unconscious or preconscious impulses in undiscoverable proportions. The unconscious motives in behavior are often described as emotional reactions.

The value of conscious thought and reason­able effort in directing our behavior, in open­ing new horizons, and in illuminating new goals for us should never be discounted or negated. But we must also recognize that deep in the psyche unconscious, emotional forces are constantly at work to modify, in­fluence, and sometimes overwhelm our intel­lectual powers.

To know this in general, and to pinpoint it as far as possible for our own particular psyche, is to take a great step forward in achieving conscious control of our uncon­scious drives. The control will never be com­plete, but it will usually be adequate to get along in the world and sustain reasonable achievement. Truly serious failure of the con­scious mind to control the unconscious forces by which it is besieged and bombarded can result in such life tragedies as mental illness, "purposive accidents," suicide, chronic al­coholism, narcotic addiction, antisocial and even criminal behavior.

Mental Health: Mind and Body

  

Mental health is another name for person-al happiness insofar as this illusory and dif­ficult goal can be attained A mentally healthy person is generally comfortable with himself and behaves acceptably in the eyes of his fellow men. The phrase "mental health" and its adjunct "mental hygiene" are com­paratively new to the English language, but the topic they cover has been the concern of poets, preachers, and philosophers in all ages and languages.

Many verbal definitions of "mental health" have been attempted. When they go beyond the portrait of the "happy man," they end in a tangle of words. As simple and sensible a con­cept as any is that proposed by Frud, namely: a person is mentally healthy to the extent that he can love and work Conversely, he is mentally ill to the degree that he cannot love or work. This concept leaves a wide range for normal behavior It also suggests that, just as perfect happiness comes to no one, even so no one is ever in perfect mental health all the time Imperfection is the distinctive badge of the human race, and we are wise when we acknowledge this about ourselves.

We must not think of mental health as a sheer abstraction. It has a locale in the body and mind of each separate individual. You included. But problems, still unresolved, arise if we attempt to assign exact bodily lo­cations to the multitudinous functions of the mind and emotions. The best we can say is that these functions occur in or are mediated by the human nervous systems, sometimes assisted by the endocrine system. We shall seek later in this chapter to provide a brief description of the human nervous systems and, beyond that, to offer some explanation of the physiology of thought and feeling.

Mental health is a 24-hour a day posses­sion. It is present during sleep as well as waking. Indeed one of the positive indications of lack of mental health is constantly dis­turbed sleep sleeplessness or insomnia. In the mentally healthy man or woman there is a regular cycle of sleep and wakefulness. Throughout all of this the unconscious mind remains in operation- Since sleep and rest are critical factors in mental health, we shall also deal with these subjects later in this chapter.

MENTAL HEALTH

It is unfortunate that for many years the mental hygiene movement and public health activities have been quite independent. Now, however, as mental hygiene moves from its traditional concern for the overtly mentally ill to the promotion of positive mental health in the general population, and as public health enters the field of the non communicable diseases, there is a growing interest in applying the time-tested techniques of public health to the problems of mental illness.

The extent of the mental health problem is very great indeed. Half of all the hospital beds in the United States are in mental hospitals; over a million persons each year receive treatment for mental and emotional problems in psychiatric clinics or the offices of private physicians. Suicide and cirrhosis of the liver vie with each other for a place on the list of the ten most common causes of death. If one adds the psychoneuroses and the psychosomatic disorders, the overall problem is staggering.

One should not overlook the emotional problems inherent in chronic disease. The psychological reaction to prolonged illness is a compound of the patient's pre`orbid personality, the precipitating stress, the nature of the disease, and the family's reaction to it. Patients may respond to chronic illness (a) by continuing an existing personality disorder, as in overtly hostile or dependent persons; (b) by reacting acutely with depression or anxiety; or (c) by developing an overt psychosis.

It is not abnormal for a person to react psychologically to an illness, especially if it is disabling or protracted. Sickness is bound to create appre­hension and even fear of death, of disability, of pain, or of the uncertain future. However, an overreaction, with excessive depression, dependency, or hostility, is abnormal. It also is abnormal for the chronic disease patient to react with rationalized denial of his problems and inappropriate affec­tation.

It is of interest that certain chronic diseases tend to occur in persons with characteristic psychological traits. The dependency and repressed hostility of those with rheumatoid arthritis and the aggressive hostility of those with hypertension or peptic ulcer are examples.