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Any condition where there is inactivity, scanty verbal productivity and poor intellectual performance resembles stupor. This triad of symptoms occurs in retarded depressions, in absorbed manic states and in perplexities. Negativism and catalepsy are never well developed except in stupor. So if these symptoms be present the diagnosis is simplified. But they are often absent from a typical stupor.
For example, the habit of refusing sleep, which is as common and almost as distressing as the habit of refusing food, depends both upon a perversion of suggestion and upon the phenomenon that we have called negativism. If struggling and crying has occurred upon a series of nights, the child comes to associate his bed not with sleep but with tears.
If, on the other hand, the doctor pursues his inquiries into the management of the child in the home, and if, for example, he finds that the crying and resistance is not confined to going to stool, but also takes place when the child is put to bed, and very often at meal-times as well, then it will be safe for him to conclude that all the symptoms are due to the same cause a sort of "negativism" which is apt to appear in all children who are directed and urged too much, and whose parents are not careful to hide from them the anxiety and distress which their conduct occasions.
There is no other way. No entreaty, no force, no threats of force will ever succeed, but will only make him worse, and, since negativism is due to mental unrest, the struggles and crying will only perpetuate the cause.
Finding that on the surface an Imperial Decree enjoyed the majesty of an Ukaze of the Czar, Europeans were ready enough to interpret as best suited their enterprises something which they entirely failed to construe in terms expressive of the negative nature of Chinese civilization; and so it happened that though the government of China had become no government at all from the moment that extraterritoriality destroyed the theory of Imperial inviolability and infallibility, the miracle of turning state negativism into an active governing element continued to work after a fashion because of the disguise which the immense distances afforded.
Now I suggest to any one that he go and visit some of the places where men who thought of Christianity as negativism thinks showed their faith and its fruits. Let him go to the Colosseum and ask the winds that moan over its ruins what they know of the history of infidelity.
If one compares these data with those given in the chapter on Malignant Stupors, it is seen that in the main Newington has made the same discrimination as we have. He is certainly wrong in denying “negativism” to his anergic type. Probably, too, he attempts too fine a distinction between the physical symptoms of the two groups.
This, too, is the time when petulance and tantrums are frequent expression of a wish to be left alone, which may account for the negativism as a consistent symptom of the same regressive progress. Just as we regress in sleep, to rise refreshed for a new day’s duties, so the stupor case often shows excessive energy in a hypomanic phase before complete normality is reached.
The one way to banish negativism and overcome the opposition is to cease to oppose, and to practise this aloofness not so much at meal-times, for somehow by patience the child must be got to take his food, but in all our conduct to him. Repression and reproof, and thwarting of the child's will, and coaxing and entreaty must cease.
But the perverseness of which we are now speaking has a different origin. It arises only when children are reproved, appealed to, and expostulated with too often and too constantly. Negativism is a symptom which is common enough in certain mental disorders. The unhappy patient always does the opposite of what is desired or expected of him.
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