e the saving grace from poor heredity, it may
itself add heavily to the debit side. With the very best of health
backgrounds, environment may damage body and mind beyond repair. Under
environment we include everything that touches life from
without--people, things, work, play, home, school, social life, business
life, college-life, etc. Among factors of environment damaging to mental
health are overemotional family life, overstrict home discipline or the
lack of needed discipline; overfeeding, underfeeding, wrong diet, lack
of proper exercise, stimulants, drugs, overstimulation, overprotection,
too much hardship and privation, loneliness, poor educational methods,
immorality, etc.

PERSONAL REACTIONS

What will decide whether a human being can resist, successfully, bad
tendencies in heredity, or in environment, or in both, and keep a
reasonably balanced mind? It demands insight, ambition, will; and if
these remain the body can be forced to saving ways of health, and body
and mind can largely make their own environment. But with heavy
handicaps of heredity or environment, or both, and poor insight, or lack
of desire, or weak will, nothing can save the mind from neurotic taint
or worse--nothing but obedience to some one strong enough to control the
habits of that life, until self-control is born. And there is a hope
that it _can_ be born in the most neurotic or neurasthenic, so long as
the mind is sane.

But after all, a large number of people whose mental processes are not
normal, have only themselves, their poor emotions, their lazy wills,
their hazy thinking to blame. We except what are called the heredity
insanities--_dementia praecox_ and the other dementias and the
_manic-depressive_ groups and _paranoia_ and _psychasthenia_--for in
these cases, possibly with the exception of the _manic depressives_,
even the most perfect environment could probably not prevent the
disorder from asserting itself. Many neurotics, neurasthenics, and
hysterics are curable if they will seriously undertake to fulfil the
laws of physical and mental health--simple laws, but ones which demand a
strengthened will to carry out.

CHAPTER X

ATTENTION THE ROOT OF DISEASE OR HEALTH ATTITUDE

THE ATTENTION OF INTEREST

Attention naturally follows interest. It can, however, be held by will
to the unappealing, with the usual result of transforming it into a
thing of interest.

One of the laws of the mind we have already stressed