"All right, stop." Kraft eased the patient back onto the bed, ending the examination. "Keep an eye on him. If anything unusual happens, notify me immediately. Don't delay."
There was reason to suspect that the abnormal hormone secretion caused by the Pituitary Tumor had also affected Dominic's mood.
The various signs Feld had described before—his obsessive excitement over abnormal targets and his tendency to act impulsively—might have been related to elevated levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone, thyroid-stimulating hormone, and the like.
After the tumor was removed, he had fallen into a low, depressed state, with frequent negative emotions.
Neither extreme was good. Considering that something was still lurking deep in his consciousness, waiting for a chance to act, Dominic's mind remained in danger.
They had to find a way to sever the connection and plug the hole. A hole in the skull was easy enough to plug, but he had no idea how to plug one in someone's thoughts.
For ordinary mental illnesses, the cognitive behavioral therapy commonly used in clinical practice mainly helped patients identify their thought patterns, question abnormal ideas, and gradually rebuild their sense of reality and security.
Its core could roughly be summed up like this: help patients give concrete form to what they feared or loathed, make it logical, and turn it into something observable, analyzable, and manageable. Give form to the formless, and thereby control it.
But if the source of the mental problem was itself a real thing, beyond the reach of ordinary thought, that would completely contradict the principles of treatment.
Unless he could, like Kraft, perceive the thing's existence from a higher perspective and form some degree of understanding of it, he would have no way to actively build a mental barrier against it.
Otherwise, every effort would become a version of