I told her at once the whole truth. I told her that she was insane. I could also tell her truthfully that she would come out of it (as she did), but that I must now take her away from this house, shut her up, and take care of her. "Oh," she said, with immense relief in her voice, "is that all? Is it nothing worse than that? Insanity is nothing compared to losing all your friends." Insanity is one of the greatest of human fears, but for this old lady, as for most of us, there is something still worse--the fear that one has not a friend in the world. Even to know that she was doomed to what most people would consider one of the worst of fates was to her a relief; for there was a worse fear in reserve, and that she now knew was groundless. The _treatment of fears_, the only treatment that I know of, is that we face them, look straight at them, as we turn a skittish horse's head right towards the thing that he is going to shy at, so he can look at it squarely. So we try to turn the person's mental gaze straight upon the thing that he fears. People frequently consult a doctor because they are afraid of fainting, fainting in church or in the street, for example. In such cases I have found it most effective to say, "Well, suppose you do--what harm will it do?" From the answers to this question I find generally that the patients have in the back of their minds, unconfessed, unrealized, the _fear that if they faint_ and nothing adequate is done to cure them _they will die_. They do not know that people who faint come to just as well if they are let alone, and that all the fussing about that is usual when people faint is useful merely to keep the bystanders busy and not to revive the patient. Make a person face "the worst" and you disarm its terrors. "But suppose I get faint on the street?" "Well, you probably will just sit down on the curbstone until you come to." That remark does not sound as if it would reassure a person even if made with a laugh. But it does, because he is thereby freed of a fear of something much worse, a fear that lurks in the background of his mind. There is one other thing to be said about the treatment of fears. If a person fears to do any particular act, such as going to church or into the subway, if he fears to be alone in crossing a big square, if he fears to get into a crowd (all these are common fears), the most important thing is to _force him to do what he most fears_. "Do the thing you are afraid of, or soon you will be afraid of something else as well. And the more you do what you fear to do, the less you will be afraid of it, because your act will bring you evidence of the truth. Your act will prove to you that you can do the thing that you fear you cannot. That fact will convince you a great deal more than all the talking that your doctor or anybody else can do. You will get conviction by reality, the best of all witnesses."