Annie Linderman, age 14, of St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, for her question:
HOW DO NEUROSES DEVELOP
A neurosis is a type of mild mental illness characterized by anxiety, unreasonable fears, insecurity and depression. It is sometimes called a psychoneurosis.
Doctors believe that most neuroses start in childhood, although the symptoms may not appear until adulthood. A child's personality might be severely scarred by such conditions as parental conflict, rejection, overprotection or excessive strictness by his parents.
Prolonged illness has helped bring about neurosis in many children. The emotional growth of a neurotic child may slow down, though his physical and intellectual growth continues normally.
Often an emotionally troubled child will experience guilt about his feelings, and so he pushes them into his unconscious mind. His mind forms barriers, called defense mechanisms, to keep the unwanted feeling from re entering his awareness.
One mechanism, known as repression, enables a child to have no recollection of such feelings. Another defense mechanism, reaction formation, builds conscious attitudes opposite to the child's real feelings.
Still another mechanism, projection, involves transferring unwanted feelings to someone else. A child might insist that a friend, not he, is angry.
As the disturbed child grows and his responsibilities increase, neurotic symptoms appear. His mind substitutes anxiety for his unwanted feelings. If he represses a feeling of anger, for example, his mind will produce anxiety in situations in which anger would be normal.
Doctors classify neuroses by their major symptoms. One common classification includes anxiety neuroses, conversion neuroses, obsessive compulsive neuroses, depressive neuroses, phobic neuroses and traumatic neuroses. Each group includes a variety of different symptoms.
Anxiety neuroses involve intense, baseless worry. Conversion neuroses cause a neurotic conflict to be expressed as a physical symptom.
Obsessive compulsive neuroses cause people to think about certain subjects or to feel forced to repeat certain acts. Depressive neuroses may result when a person overreacts to an unhappy event.
Phobic neuroses involve one or more exaggerated, unrealistic fears called phobias. The patient may fear some animal or he may panic in enclosed areas.
Traumatic neuroses result from an overwhelming emotional experience. A soldier, for example, may collapse emotionally after repeatedly enduring the danger and fear of battle.