Word: stress
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mind & Mouse. Psychiatrist Sargant, 50, thought he saw similar mechanisms in the breakdowns of British soldiers and heavily bombed civilians in World War II. From his evidence that the strongest-willed soldier would collapse if battle stress were sufficiently prolonged, Dr. Sargant took a flying leap to the conclusion that virtually any man's mind, if it cracks, will follow one of the behavior patterns that Pavlov thought he saw in dogs. At first, says Sargant, the mind seems to equalize all stimuli and reacts with the same intensity to a bomb attack or the squeal of a mouse...
...fitted Pavlov's pattern. After early failures, Wesley turned his back on appeals to the intellect, made a frank and crude assault on the emotions. He preached so eloquently and graphically of the horrors of hell-fire.and brimstone that the wayward among his hearers found the prospect an unbearable stress, says Dr. Sargant. He quotes Wesley as describing meeting after meeting at which the penitent burst into tears, cried aloud, sweated profusely, shook all over, and often fell into stuporous states. This final stage seemed to fit both Pavlovian theory and modern psychiatric observation-that a patient usually collapses exhausted...
...West, Pavlov sought to prove that dogs are of four temperamental types, "strong excitatory," "lively," "calm imperturbable, or phlegmatic," and "weak inhibitory."* Further, he developed an elaborate theory of both positive and negative conditioned responses, which appear in varying patterns when a dog is subjected to unendurable stress ("trans-marginally stimulated"). A dog usually breaks down if the stress signal, e.g., an electric shock, is merely increased in intensity, also if an unwonted time lag is left between the signal and the food that follows, or if signals are simply mixed. A fourth way, and to Dr. Sargant the most...
...theory of the nature of schizophrenia, at which he had only hinted previously (TIME, May 14, 1956). He and his colleagues believe that schizophrenia is a "genetically determined metabolic disease"-i.e., a disorder of body chemistry which reflects a defect in the inherited genes. He relegated emotional stress, generally regarded as a major cause of the illness, to a minor role. Psychiatrist Heath also suggested that schizophrenia is far commoner than usually recognized, and that "the overwhelming majority of patients reporting to the psychiatrist for treatment are probably suffering to some degree from this disease." (At least half...
Discussing treatment of the disease, Heath turned his back dramatically on his own analytic training, declared that conventional psychiatric treatment based on analytic principles is wrong for schizophrenics-by increasing the stress to which they are subject, it can make their condition worse. He said that his laboratories had extracted something from the brains of cattle which he had tried in schizophrenic patients. What the substance is, Experimenter Heath did not claim to know: he gets it from the "septal region" (part of the midbrain. in front of the hypothalamus) of bovine brains. One test: Heath & Co. shot taraxein into...