Mental and emotional diseases §210-§230 The mental and emotional state: chief ingredient of all diseases §210-§214 Organon §210
Mental and emotional diseases are not sharply separated from other classes of disease because in every disease, the mental and emotional state is altered.
Almost all of the diseases that I have termed one-sided belong to psora. These diseases appear to be more difficult to cure because of this one-sidedness (where all the rest of the disease symptoms vanish, as it were, before a single, great, prominent symptom). The so-called mental and emotional diseases 186 are of this kind. They do not, however, constitute a class of diseases that is sharply separated from the rest of the diseases because, in all the so-called somatic diseases as well, the mental and emotional frame of mind is always altered. 187 In all cases of disease to be cured, the patient's emotional state should be noted as one of the most preeminent symptoms, along with the symptom complex, if one wants to record a true image of the disease in order to be able to successfully cure it homeopathically.
Comment
186 'Mental' is translated from Geist (spirit) and 'emotional' is translated from Gemьt (the emotional mind). See mental and emotional in the Glossary.
187 For example, one often encounters patients with the most painful, protracted diseases who have a mild, gentle emotional mind such that the medical-art practitioner feels impelled to bestow attention and sympathy upon them. If the physician conquers the disease and restores the patient again (which is not a rare possibility with the homeopathic mode of treatment) the physician is often astonished and startled at the dreadful alteration of the patient's emotional mind. The physician often meets with ingratitude, hard-heartedness, deliberate malice and the most degrading, the most revolting tempers of humanity-qualities that were precisely those possessed by the patient in former, healthy days. One often finds that people who were patient in healthy times become, in disease: stubborn, violent, hasty, and even insufferable, self-willed and in due succession, impatient and despairing [i.e. , impatient then despairing, etc.]. Those who were formerly chaste and modest often become lascivious and shameless. Not seldom, one finds that bright people become dull-witted, those who are usually feeble-minded become more clever (as it were, more sensible) and the slow-witted occasionally become full of presence of mind and rapid resolve, etc.