But not all visits to the doctor end so briefly or so easily as this. The patient’s trouble, on examination, may prove to be organic and of long standing. Does the doctor consider then that it is his duty to emulate the Christian Scientist or to “make the patient forget it?” On the contrary, he does not flinch from the employment of the most searching methods of investigation, lengthy and often painful treatment, and, if it seems necessary in the patient’s interest, he will carry out or arrange for operative interference which may be difficult, expensive, by no means free from danger, and is quite likely to “make the patient worse,” perhaps for a considerable time, before its beneficial results appear. It is therefore idle to argue that on the one hand psychological methods of treating mental disorder are unnecessary because some patients get better without their application; while, on the other, they are dangerous because they may make a patient worse. The same remarks could be applied to most of the successful operative methods of present-day medicine. All of them are fraught with grave potentiality for harm if applied by unskilled persons. The degree to which the doctor is medically justified in probing the patient’s intimacies is obviously dependent upon the individual case. Not all patients require such drastic incisions; a fact which has been clearly shown in the special military hospitals. An intelligent man of strong will, whose social relations have hitherto been normal and happy, might be temporarily “bowled over” by the emotional stress of the campaign, but after a few inquiries into the causes of his mental anguish and a few explanations, he is often set on his feet again. We must not forget, however, the other side of the picture. There are many patients, who, far from being made worse by the confidential recital and discussion of their mental troubles to a suitable person, experience great relief as a result of this unburdening. Men in the military hospitals have expressed this over and over again, in such phrases as, “I have been bursting to tell this to someone who would understand,” or, “I have seen many doctors since I left the front, but you are the first who has asked me anything about my mind.” Frequently the troubles prove to be caused by their ignorance of the great individual differences in minds, so that the appearance in them of a new but by no means pathological mental phenomenon frightens them unduly. We have already referred to cases of this kind in Chapter I.[44] Another frequent cause of the most intense and continuous mental anguish is the exaggerated self-reproach which the patients attach to some real, but in the judgment of others, comparatively trivial defect or delinquency in themselves. To borrow an expressive phrase, the neurasthenic has “lost his table of values.” It is in such cases that a talk with a tactful, sympathetic, broad-minded physician may produce the happiest results.