THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EARTHQUAKES

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EARTHQUAKES

PRODUCING FRENZIED TERROR,

What is the effect on men's minds of earthquakes? asks a writer in the "Weekly Scotsman." When these appalling visitations come at long intervals like "bolts from the blue," they produce a very frenzy of terror; the whole community subject to the shock becomes hysterical, and men and women lose their reason for a space. But though,, as in Japan after the convulsion of 1891, when nearly 10,000 lives were lost, the mental excitement leads to sp-inal and other nervous disorders, the sense, of relief which supervenes when tha terror has passed tends to obliterate the impression which it has made. The survivors laugh and joke, and catch at trifles, in order to banish the dreadful nightmare. Such was the case at San Francisco. Themistocles prayed for a talent of forgetting; tut the majority of mankind have the faculty in a highly-developed degree. Were it otherwise, brooding would lead to madness, and life on this glob© would be well-nigh insupportable. The long series of shocks and disasters culminating in the recent terrible holocaust ha* had a great effect on the mental and moral character of the Japanese Lighthearted as they are by nature, the ever-recurring catastrophes to which they are subject have developed a stoicism and contempt for death of quite the old Roman type. •