Of Nervous Collapse or Psychiatric Implosion.

'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But of the two less dangerous is the offense
To tire our patience than mislead our sense.
Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
A fool might once himself alone expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own. POPE.

THAT there should be objective causes for subjective thoughts is a sympathetic position for anyone who believes in rationality as the great talisman of social interaction, but as I have said to some nurses it is not possible to rationalise irrationality legitimately (actually it is most possible, but only in the sense G.K. Chesterton would have in one of his excellent paradoxes, namely, that it is only possible to reconcile the opponent categories by smashing both of them into bits). Therefore if one were afraid of a madman preparing to throw some paint on one's most expensive clothes a nurse might say, 'What reason can you give for this belief?' and the patient might reply, 'What reason can you give for the act?'

    The stigma of psychiatric disorders is great, and the perception thereof survives the blandishment attempts of others to persuade (through their smiles and teeth) that no one thinks any different of one due to hallucinations, delusions, and suchlike other oddities. It is difficult to name a lie that is well meant, especially when spoken by someone dear, and when it is intended as a soothing sedative rather than as a stinging poison, but I think human nature so much a pack instinct that when one hyena begins to behave strangely the others begin to shun him unconsciously.

    How much of life is a waking dream! How much might be considered psychotic were it not confined and straightened by a conscious will, in the anxiety not to alarm peers and fellows? A jealous suspicion, the green-eyed monster, a misinterpreted look or word, a fancy magnified or plumped with meditation, these symptoms are of social inspection, introspection, and retrospection, of analysis of observed behaviour that, mingled with the hopes and fears of all the years, can sometimes indicate us out of danger and sometimes mislead us into confusion. And some brains are more fallible than others no doubt; and some circumstances are more conducive to malady than prosperity, though not by obvious appearance or cataloguing of merits and demerits. What happens happens; whether by fate it is almost unnecessary to question. Free wills say a number of other things might have happened, but they cannot answer the simple fact that they did not, and as much as the inevitable certainty of events cannot be altered once past, so much might be called Destiny or Providence. Except of course in that we are not apprised of an infallible memory or reason, and so to we human things the past is still a current coin of remembrance and reprocessing. Nevertheless, acceptance and respectfulness to the Tide makes the better swimmer, as Spinoza essentially described in his last and best section of his Ethics On the Intellectual Love of God which is quite simply the case made for appreciating existence's glory rather than (forever) railing against one's individual dissatisfaction. Which thing seems continually to be my own great personal fault and burden as one who hopes and expects better of his own example.