Can Handwriting Help Diagnose Mental Illness?
Today it would be difficult to deny that the individual's mind can influence his actions. No one, born with a certain standard of intelligence, need remain irredeemably bound to that standard all his life; methods can be found to make the intelligence better equipped to deal with life. Handwriting is one way to determine how an individual has adapted to a mental illness, which is an intelligence change.
A mind, which has lost or misdirected its goal, which is, for instance, undeveloped in an ability to cooperate, will fail to exercise a helpful influence on the growth of the personality. For this reason we find that many who, as children, lacked cooperativeness, reveal in their maturity a poorly developed intelligence and a lack of normal social understanding.
Many psychologists have pointed out the consistent relationship between the mind and the body. None of them, however, has attempted to discover the actual bridge between the two.
We must never try to diagnose one symptom alone or a single manifestation of abnormality; we must rather study the symptoms in their entirety and from them discover the underlying fault. In this way we can see the basic error behind the way in which the mind has interpreted its experience, its channeling of life's potentialities, and its reactions to impressions received. This must be the real task of psychology. Psychotic states are not incurable if the necessary interest in others can be aroused before it is too late; but all this places a wider distance between the individual and the normal world than any other condition, except perhaps, the act of committing suicide. It is an intricate art to cure such cases and an extremely difficult one. We must win the patient back to a cooperative state, and we can only do this through great patience and the kindest and most understanding manner.
Now let us consider the various mental diseases and the way in which they change the character and behavior of the individual.
Certain types of schizophrenia detach themselves from all outward influences, and lead a wily and self-centered life, attaching importance to nothing but their own poor ego. The neurotic too is mostly concerned with himself, but at times will also take an interest in the life around him. The truly psychotic, however, eventually withdraws completely into himself, becomes indifferent to any external stimulus, and is wholly insensible to everything that happens around or even to himself. His egocentricity consists of a detachment from the world and a resulting and complete isolation.
In comparing the handwriting of psychotics with that of their earlier and saner lives, we can observe an increased rigidity and monotony, and an impoverishment of forms. The egocentricity of the psychotic does not only manifest itself in involved traits (although fixed and delirious ideas are expressed in involved and futile large backward flourishes), but the increased tendency towards total isolation is mainly mirrored in increasingly static traits and senseless disconnections, which eventually lose any sign of vivacity, speed, or harmoniousness.
Graphic rigidity, therefore, is a symbol of the writer's lack of impressionability, showing him to be insensible to all the variety and rich experiences of the outward world. Just as the mind of the psychotic has no participation in all the fertile influences of this world, his handwriting reflects a similar rigidity and impoverishment of forms. We observe childish letter formation in the handwriting of the educated adult psychotic, which reverts to the archaic forms of a remote state of civilization proving that handwriting changes with a person's mental state.
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