Mental Health - How to get it right?

No one is perfectly healthy; perfection is rarely reached by humans. But these are goals to be sought throughout life. And let us round out the picture. To be normal is not to be untouched by fears and conflicts. Healthy People Are Human There is limits to what even the best-adjusted can take. During war- time, it was clear that pilots, even the healthiest, could carry out just so many bombing missions before suffering combat fatigue.

They recovered quickly if relieved of the unbearable tension. Some forms of stress are difficult for anyone to endure long. And some forms of stress can be endured by one normal person and not by another. When not long ago a distinguished physician had to face a situation he knew would be difficult for even a doctor-the fatal illness of his only child-he sought help from a psychiatrist. He wanted help so he in turn could give the best help of which he was capable to his wife.

While pressures sometimes go to dramatic extremes, routine everyday life too can be frustrating and stressful. The business executive under pressure to make a profit, the student obliged to make good grades, the worker on an assembly line pressed to meet a quota-these and other people in many situations need to find acceptable outlets for daily pressures. Normal people aren't all alike. Obviously, they do not have the same intellectual and physical endowments. There are different personality types as well. There are people who are introverted, absorbed in what goes on inside their own minds; there are others, extroverts, more interested in external events than in their own inner experiences. Dr. Karen Horney, a distinguished psychiatrist, defined three basic character types: those who move toward people, those who move against people, and those who move away from people.

These might become, respectively, successful salesmen, competitive athletes, and philosophers-or, under unfortunate circumstances, playboys, gunmen, and recluses. Normal people are influenced by unconscious motivations. Even before Freud, people often noticed, for example, that they forgot some things they did not want to remember, even though they had supposed they wanted to remember them. They knew that one could fall in love despite a conscious intention not to do so. In short, they knew that something went on under the surface of their awareness. Even a well-adjusted per- son does not, for example, fall in love in completely conscious fashion, although he is not ruled by his unconscious to such an extent that he falls in love with someone he knows to be completely unworthy of his affection.