A present-day conception of mental disorders / Charles Macfie Campbell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Campbell, Charles Macfie, 1876-1943, author.

Series:

Harvard health talks.

Harvard health talks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychology, Pathological.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (53 pages).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Harvard university press, 1924.

Summary:

"This lecture proposes to deal with human nature working under difficulties, and to choose one small portion of that broad problem. I should like to interest you in some facts rather than in words, in a sample of the real stuff of human life rather than in the traditional and threadbare phrases with which we too often disguise the actual world, giving ourselves a pleasing illusion of knowledge. I ask you, therefore, to consider our topic to be not "mental disorders," but men, women, and children in difficulty, suffering, hoping, thwarted, groping. Many people are suffering from a mental disorder, who in the current estimate of their friends are considered only as eccentric, model, disagreeable, extreme, wicked, virtuous, emancipated, etc. The same situation is met in regard to other disorders. In referring to a reaction as a mental disorder we do not necessarily mean that the condition is severe or serious. Mental disorders may be mild, just as physical disorders may be; mental indigestion may be of as many degrees as physical indigestion, and an emotional disturbance may be as mild as an attack of chicken-pox. Mental disorder may masquerade under many disguises, and human nature in difficulties may resort to many subtle evasions and modes of defense; we are so much under the spell of old-fashioned conceptions of human behavior that the real driving forces of the personality escape us, while we label behavior with the conventional ethical or social terms.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references.