HE-362
Leaflet 3
Agricultural Extension Service
Purdue University
Home Economics Extension
BETTER MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES FOR ADULTS II
Lesson 1. Your Emotions and Mental Health
by
Dorothy V. Mummery
Extension Specialist
Child-Adult Development and Family Relationships
Intense Emotion a Universal Experience
Everybody, at one time or another, has been very angry about something.* Everyone has had the experience of being intensely afraid, too. Many persons have had the experience of being paralyzed with fear, or prostrate with fear. All energy is sapped. The individual becomes unable to function or to work effectively. All his efforts are ineffectual.
Uncontrolled emotions can do much harm. If they run wild, they can be very destructive. As indicated above, they keep us from intelligent, purposeful, and successful activity. Thus, they keep us from accomplishment. There is an example of an author who went to her desk to write, but had no ideas at all. Soon she became very impatient with herself. She became so impatient that this only further confused her thinking. A year went by and she had written practically nothing. It took the help of a psychiatrist to get her back to her normal amount of creative writing. He told her she was to go to her desk every day but all she had to do was keep calm. She was not to be concerned whether she wrote or not, as long as she kept calm.
We are all familiar with what panic at sea does. There are many instances of the result of panic at a fire. These situations show us that it takes a calm state of mind to think clearly. They also show us that fear is contagious.
But uncontrolled emotion is destructive in many other ways:
1. Some people throw dishes and break them.
2.	Some people physically harm others when under the influence of anger.
3.	Jealousy makes children harm a baby brother or sister.
4. A jealous child may be mean to the cat or another animal.
5. An angry or jealous adult may take it out on a child or animal.
6.	Jealousy or anger may cause murder.
7.	Anger makes us say and do things that hurt others. Thus it may destroy happy personal relationships. We hurt the feelings of our husbands and wives and children. We hurt our friends,
8.	We may do things that hurt our reputation.
9.	Emotion may even destroy our own personality.
With all of these destructive results of anger and fear and jealousy, we might ask ourselves if emotions serve any good purpose in our lives. It is only emotions hat run wild that are so destructive. In truth, emotions are the motive power, the
* It is true that some people are more sensitive than others; i.e., their feelings are more intense.