What complicates his sex difficulties, and makes social adjustment almost impossible or completely impossible, is that his pituitary frequently cannot react to assist him.  Often, as emphasized, it is bound in by bone on all sides and neither ante-pituitary nor post-pituitary can adequately secrete for his needs.  So social instinct and the capacity for inhibition, the ability to control himself conceptually and somatically, are poor.  As a child it is difficult to train him along the lines of the elementary habits and customs.  He is into late childhood a bed-wetter, and steals and lies quasi-unconsciously.

His mother realizes soon that he cannot be made to acquire a sense of responsibility either for himself or for others.  She becomes afraid to let him go into the street because of his inability to take care of himself, to acquire the right attitude toward street cars, autos, strangers, in short, danger.  She dreads to take him to places because no sooner would they be out of them, than she would discover that he had taken something that did not belong to him, quite as a matter of course.  He will fabricate stories with no motive, fabricate them out of whole cloth for the pure fun of it.  In a word, moral irresponsibility is the keynote of the volitional traits of the thymo-centric personality from childhood up.

With so much against them, physical inferiorities, mental defects, moral lacks of every sort, it is little wonder that the thymo-centrics die young.  Infections hit them badly.  The cases of flu that went off in twenty-four hours belonged to the type.  Fulminant meningitis, pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever, the varieties that are supposed to kill in twenty-four to forty-eight hours because of the terrible virulence of the attacking microbe, are probably so malignant only because the organism attacked is a thymus subject.

In the alcohol and drug habitue wards of hospitals as well as in medicolegal cases of degenerates, gunmen and other criminals, the characteristic conformation and diagnostic stigmata of the thymo-centric are often encountered.  Life treats them badly.  Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of society.  If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to compensate for their defects, they may become the queer brilliants, the eccentric geniuses of the arts and sciences.  Should they not, mental deficiency and delinquency are their portion.  Epilepsy, then, is sometimes their mode of escape from the terrors of an utterly foreign world.  Should they survive all other hazards, suicide may still be their most frequent fate.  A study of 122 cases of suicide by one observer showed that the status lymphaticus was practically constant and often pronounced.

Certain of them, after a stormy life in the twenties, become adapted to their surroundings in the thirties because the pituitary gradually emerges and becomes dominant in their personalities.  They are then recessive thymocentrics.  An increase in size, a broadening, together with a greater mental tranquillity and stability, accompany the adaptation.  Historically, the thymocentrics who combined brilliancy and instability played a great part as some of the famous adventurers and restless experimentalists.