With the increase in psychic problems...

With the increase in psychic problems, the corresponding increase in the number of psychotherapists and psychiatrists has not at all helped to meet the situation. Dr. Schneider writes: What is it that has a greater share of human misery than anything else? I can answer this question in my capacity as a physician. It is a chronic disease. It will frighten you somewhat if you think about it.

For out of a thousand kinds of diseases to which the human constitution is prone, one of them is as prevalent as the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine of them. In the United States of America, fifty percent of those who go to see a physician suffer from this illness. Some claim that the figure is even higher than fifty percent. At the Oxis Clinic in New Orleans a report was prepared about five hundred patients who had consecutively made a call to that place.

It revealed that seventy-five percent of them suffered from this illness. A person could be affected by it irrespective of his age and the stage of his life. Moreover, the diagnosis and treatment of this disease are terribly expensive. I will hasten to refrain from mentioning its name, for that may lead you to a misunderstanding. Its first characteristic is that it is not a real disease. Traditionally it was referred to as 'mental illness' and now they call it psychosomatic disorder.

It is not an illness in the sense that the sick person should really consider himself to be ill. But the suffering that one undergoes as a result of it is as severe as the spasms of pain due to bilious colic. Psychosomatic illness is not something produced by bacteria, virus, or an unnatural growth of bodily tissue, but is something caused by the conditions of daily life.

Whenever someone is enclosed within a thick and impenetrable shell of anxieties, worries and problems from which he cannot emerge into the world of joy and peace, we consider him as suffering from psychosomatic illness.[^1] Freud says: The primitive man satisfied his desires in a better way than the civilised man. His life was free from mental anxieties and cares, and he did not suffer from psychic ailments.

But since the advent of civilisation, industry and urbanisation, man came to suffer from serious mental illnesses.[^2] The Cause of Psychic Afflictions One of the factors responsible for anxiety is acquisitiveness.