The Salt Lake Tribune from Salt Lake City, Utah • 63

THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE SUNDAY MpRNING NOVEMBER 8 1931 yuayW c9ti Mental Way A mother-m-Iaw for example can irritate the mind of the especially sensitive person and give him emotional spasms ust as ragweed pollen gives sneezing paroxysms to others Some persons (just took below) faint at the sight of blood This can ba traced to a specific emotional upset caused by a specific the blood stream These are called antibodies They give the body protection against later i fection by the same injurious substance Thus the final step in this process is protee tion or immunity But a preliminary stage be fore the antibodies are produced is one ia which the body has an increased susceptibility to the virus Decreased resistance to infections or allergens also has been noted following excessive strain and chilling Likewise emotional upsets have a tendency to weaken bodily resistance The connection between the emotions and the allergies is interesting iq connection with Dr theory- By Marjorie Van de Water Emotion changes the blood pressure and interferes with the a person suspected of crime Dr Marshall indicated In this test the physician speaks a word and the patient quickly answers with the first word that pops into his mind Thus if he says you might answer "August" or or perhaps even Among a lot such unimportant words certain key" words are introduced designed to detect the guilt of the suspect or the psycho-allergens of the patients The word for example may cause a person if he is emotionally af- fected by that word to delay his answer and make the record a telltale change in the electric potential of his skin Only certain words will make the subject produce the betraying record He is upset by them because he has previously become sensitized to those particular words They have become for him psycho-allergens Dr Marshall explains Why do persons develop these quirks? Or why do persons have the physical allergies for that matter? Those are questions for which physicians and other scientists are still seeking satisfactory answers It seems to be partly a matter of heredity we appear to get from our parents either a tendency to be hypersensitive or to be immune And it is partly a matter of exposure Such sensitivities seldom develop toward irritants that are rarely encountered In England it is said that hay fever patients are more likely to be sensitive to the pollen of grasses than to that of ragweed In the United States ragweed is the chief offender Ragweed is rare in England an extremely common plant in the United States So presumably it is with the psycho-allergens It is the poor fellow who lives with the mother who is most likely to deselop "mother-in-law A LLERGY is simply a condition of abnor-mal susceptibility to something which is perfectly harmless to another person The old adage that "What is one meat is another applies admirably here The allergic person is that other man How does he that Well that is a long story and is tied up with a related question concerning the development of immunity- If a living cell is injured the result is either repair of the damage or death of the cell But that is not the whole story Dr Marshall points out If the repair process once starts properly Nature does not he down on the job She not only repairs the damage but produces much more of the repair material than is needed In the first place the allergies affect generally the breathing apparatus as in hay fever or asthma the digestive apparatus as in nausea or sick headache or the skin as in hives These are matters controlled by the involuntary ner vous system And in turn they are controlled by the endocrine glands Snd the emotions That emotion can produce headache is well known to most persons It is by upsetting the working of the glands and involuntary nervoua system that it can produce these and other allergic symptoms A ND just as the emotions play their part ia the physical upsets of the allergic so the mechanisms are disturbed by the emo tional upsets of the psycho-allergic person Ulcers in the stomach contractions of the intes final apparatus high blood pressure these are a few of the physical disturbances believed te have their origin or at least their aggravation in emotional upsets Psycho-allergy really seems like just an other face of the familiar coin of physical al lergy does an individual become hypersen asks Dr Marshall He answers: seems that the modus operandi is the same in psycho-allergy as it is 'in the field of allergy A person may he immune congenitally to certain psycho-allergens furthermore he may be able" to desensitize himself to them an individual may become hyper sensitive to a particular subject likewise he may undergo desensitization by himself by means of the above mentioned processes or he may be desensitized through the method of psychoanalysis" The newborn baby whose emotions have never been excited is not psycho-allergic Dr Marshall continues But if he is subjected te some sort of emotion-arousing situation then he may grow into a state of hypersensitivity Similar sensitizing processes occur in every case of psychic conflict Dr Marshall says Any agent that is capable of stimulating as organism so that it responds must be thought of as being capable of producing a state of susceptibility in the organism he concludes It ia just as logical he argues to think of an idee or a word or a person or other psycho logical agent as capable of producing susceptibility as it is to think of a virus or a pollen at MAYBE you know someone who get along with his mother in-law The very mention of her name will start a tirade If she shows up at his house he is thrown into a fit of emotion that spoils his whole day A new explanation for this mother-in-law trouble is offered to scientists by Dr Wallace Marshall a psychiatrist of Appleton Wis He says that it is a kind of of the mind hay has nothing to do with pestiferous ragweed that throws the unfortunate into paroxysms of sneezing when they breathe its fine pollen But a mother-in-law can irritate the minds of certain especially sensitive persons in a way closely parallel to the manner that certain pollens irritate the breathing tracts of others Dr Marshall says He traces the parallel in a report to the American Journal of Psychiatry where he introduces it to his fallow scientists as a long-sought link between the mind and the body between biology and abnormal psychology In tht case of hay fever itself bombardment by pollen will sensitize the victim so that thereafter the least whiff of that pollen will start a fit of sneezing In a comparable way Dr Marshall explains over-exposure to an irritating mother-in-law may make a person supersensitive to irritation from that source Thereafter even a slight reminder of her is enough to bring on a fit of rage In both cases it may be just the one irritant that causes all the trouble The father-in-law for example may not precipitate any violence any more than daisies cause hay fever THE hay fever victim can be relieved of his symptoms by a process of desensitizing He is given gradually increasing doses of the pollen in the form of injections until he is taking it in such large amounts that he is rendered immune to the ordinary irritation of pollen Similarly the son-in-law can desensitize himself in regard to the mother-in-law Df Marshall encourages Or he can gain -through the service of the physician dealing jWith nervous diseases With body and mind alike it is not just the one single irritant that may cause trouble Although it may be only one that affects any one person a great variety of irritants claim their own individual victims Plant pollens are the most familiar of these irritants to the allergies as they are known to the physician But some persons are sensitive to certain fowls such as shell fish eggs strawberries and even wheat and spinach These persons have intestinal upsets or hives whenever they eat the offending food Other persons are allergic to heat or to cold Some can't stand the touch of fur Others are botheied by fresh paint Face powder will make some individuals positively ill The goo put on hair to make it slick or to set waves is poison to a few persons So it is too with the "psycho-allergies" as Dr Marshall calls such special Irritations in the field of the mind The mother-in-law is only an all too familiar example of a very numerous group Each prerson probably has built up his own peculiar set of which cause him fils of mental hay fever Here are a few cited by Dr Marshall The stutterer respiratory embarrassment which the stutterer suffers is a psycho-allergic reaction which may have inferiority as its basis" he says The drunkard dipsomaniac" says Dr Marshall a flight from reality in liquor He does not drink for the sport of drinking he imbibes because he needs a re--treat front the definite psycho-allergens to which he has developed a state of hypersensitivity" The criminal who loses his nerve A killer who disposes of those in his way without the slightest sign of art emotion may develop a sensitive period and lose Jhis nerve completely Dr Marshall-indicated The person who faints at the sight of blood Such fainting can be traced to a specific emotional upset caused by a specific psycho-allergen ArOU will undoubtedly think of other sim-liar examples from your own experience of hay You may have seen a man fly into a rage whenever a certain subject was mentioned The rage seems completely inexplicable unless you know the back- ground for it If you happen to know that vacations are a perennial subject for wrangling between that man and his wife you would understand why he turns purple when some stranger asks where He spent the summer Or if you know that be once lost a small son Jby drowning you would realize why the mention of boating might make him turn pale The physician deajing with mental ills can find the causes of mental hay fever with the word association test the same one that is sotnetimes Used with the to trap The surplus repair parts are discharged into doing so fOanvrljrht bv Facta Wk qan ira).