Craziness

“ Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, Delirium is a common name to all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savanarola, Guianerius, Montaltus, confound them as differing secundum magis et minus; so doth David, Psal. xxxvii. 5. “I said unto the fools, deal not so madly,” and 'twas an old Stoical paradox, omnes stultos insanire, [179] all fools are mad, though some madder than others. And who is not a fool, who is free from melancholy? Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition? ”

“ The devilish wit born of our own brain, that sneers at us for our own failings? Perhaps madness? More likely, for there are few men who are not mad one hour of the waking twelve. If differing from the judgment of the majority of mankind in regard to familiar things be madness, I suppose I am mad—or too wise. The speculation draws near to hair-splitting. James North, recall your early recklessness, your ruin, and your redemption; bring your mind back to earth. Circumstances have made you what you are, and will shape your destiny for you without your interference. ”

“ But there is, in truth, as little of affected as of actual madness in his behaviour in her presence. When he comes before her pale and trembling, speechless and with staring eyes, it is with no simulated insanity, but in the agonized hope, scarce distinguishable from despair, of finding, in the testimony of her visible presence, an assurance that the doubts ever tearing his spirit and sickening his brain, are but the offspring of his phantasy. ”

“ A convulsive wave of madness would overwhelm their still limbs. They would jump up, yelling and howling like animals; they would forget that they had wives, sisters, mothers, and would begin casting themselves about like men stricken with sudden blindness, in their madness throttling each other with their white fingers fragrant with scent. ”

“ I have seen them behold the strange antics of others, with intense wonder and interest.—Often they will catch the contagion of laughter; and thus if the understanding has no part in the matter, their spirits, at all events, partake of the merriment of the scene around them; and though insanity, considered in the abstract, is a melancholy thing, yet it is a truth, that there is much more of merriment than melancholy among the insane. I believe their average of happiness is greater than would be found among the same number in the world. ”

“ That activity of mind in excess may induce even mania, I may offer two impressive, although negative, proofs, from the records of Dr. Rush.—“In despotic countries, and where the public passions are torpid, and where life and property are secured only by the extinction of domestic affections, madness is a rare disease. ”

“ I have already noticed, [143] that the excitement of the depressing and exhilarating passions alternately, is the most striking characteristic of the old insane,—so striking that the general division of insanity is intomania and melancholia; a division, however, which is altogether unphilosophical, as the mania and melancholia are not any abstract difference in the cause of the disease itself, but merely the results of the over-active nervous energy operating in different directions—at one time on the depressing, another on the exhilarating passions ”

“ With such an impaired and diseased state of the system, and with the constant excitement to which both body and mind are subjected, it is no wonder that the intemperate are peculiarly liable to insanity. ”

“ So are the brains of sick and frenzied men
Stored with unreal and strange imaginations.
(After a short pause.) Am I become a maniac? Oh! have words, To which the firm conviction of my mind
So strongly stands opposed, the baleful power
To fix this misery on me? This is madness! ”

“ What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this. ”

“ From the view we have now taken of the propriety of exciting fear, as a means of promoting the cure of insanity, by enabling the patient to control himself, it will, perhaps, be almost superfluous to state as our opinion, that the idea, which has too generally obtained, of it being necessary to commence an acquaintance with lunatics, by an exhibition of strength, or an appearance of austerity, is utterly erroneous. ”

“ See now what a charge you yourselves bring upon the things which you practise. If these things have been invented for the purpose of lightening sorrow and affording enjoyment, how is it that the invocations of demons are performed in groves and woods? What is the meaning of the insane whirlings, and the slashing of limbs, and the cutting off of members? How is it that mad rage is produced in them? How is insanity produced? How is it that women are driven violently, raging with dishevelled hair? ”

“ All the petty annoyances of life—a sudden fall, an unlucky [pg 103] word, a headache, a paltry quarrel—were set down to the agency of fiends; and all the fierce emotions that rend the mind—love, hate, jealousy, and madness—were equally the work of these invisible tormentors. Men and women stood in constant danger of them. ”

“ In both there is an equal derangement. On dissection, the state of the brain does not shew any appearances peculiar to melancholia; nor is the treatment, which I have observed most successful, different from that which is employed in mania.
As the practitioner’s own mind must be the criterion, by which he infers the insanity of any other person; and when we consider the various, and frequently opposite, opinions of these intellectual arbitrators; the reader will be aware that I have not abstained from giving a definition of madness without some reason. ”

“ Upon this actual weakness of mind, and suicidal melancholy, combined with native humour and the biting irony into which his view of the world has sharpened it, is added the feigned form of insanity, the antic disposition wilfully put on, the dishevelled habiliments of person and conversation. ”

“ Surely an intuition of this restless and no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient almost, but not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy. ”

“ Here the self-pampering of a vain man had its issue. Here the woman, undisciplined, impetuous, catching sight of the means to do a deed, moves to the fatal stroke like one possessed. It is the sort of thing we often call madness, and yet such insanity is but the expression of what men and women choose to be capable of. ”

“ My dear sir, the man must have been thrashing about—absolutely thrashing about, like a dashed salmon on a dashed hook. He must have had a paroxysm of some kind—some kind of a dashed fit. A doctor could give you the name for it. It's a well-known form of insanity. Paranoia—isn't that what they call it? ”

“ To impress ordinary persons with the existence of insanity, some prominent and strongly marked features are absolutely required; as the popular feeling and intelligence concerning madness is the result of those glaring exhibitions, those caricatures of disease which the stage represents or romances propagate. Of methodical madness, of systematic perversion of intellect, the [12] multitude can form no adequate conception, and cannot be persuaded that insanity exists without turbulent expression, extravagant gesture, or phantastic decoration. ”

“ It is, indeed, no unusual characteristic of madness to shun, as by a kind of cunning, all mention of the names of those by whom the madness has been caused. It is as if the unfortunates imagined that the madness might be undiscovered if the images connected with it were unbetrayed. ”

“ I have the cold consciousness of the fall of perdition, deceit and insolubility.
You learned men will argue about me. Some of you will say that I am mad, others will demonstrate that I am normal, and will admit only certain limitations in the name of degeneracy. With all your learning, however, you cannot demonstrate my madness or my normality as clearly as I can. My mind has returned to me, as you shall be convinced. It lacks neither in power nor in keenness. Excellent, energetic thought, giving even its enemies their due! ”

“ We are not to wonder, then, that those whose spirits have thus been prematurely entombed within them, should have become almost as dead to themselves and the world, as if the soul had already left them. To prevent these consequences, I shall state all that I think ought to be done, in another number of this work; which I conceive is the most interesting part in the treatment of insanity. ”

“ He spoke as men do in fevers. I could see that there were some about us who set him down as mad. There were those who jeered, as fools will at the sight of a man's anguish, when, in the abandonment of his shame, he trails his soul in the dust. ”

“ But when we come to the proximate causes of insanity, we are in a region level to the uninstructed mind, and here we find that moral and mental excitements growing out of love, such as jealousy and disappointment, are prolific causes: that physical ailments badly attended or wholly neglected frequently result in derangement ”

“ His habits of circumgyration, with sudden stops and starts,—his strange air of abstractedness, a sort of excogitative look, apparently puzzled to find something out,—odd way of talking to himself, as if he himself were some other person, saying, “what a noise the fellow makes,” “I think the fellow’s a fool,” and striking his face in apparent anger,—strange mode of mentioning names once familiar to him,—putting a question,—seeming to listen, and giving an answer quite foreign to it, are most striking, and such as no descriptive powers can enable another to conceive, without seeing him. ”

“ Writers have rather portrayed the sensations they would themselves, in the possession of full consciousness and of high sensibility, experience by a transfer to an institution as hopelessly mad, and have overlooked both the state of mental abasement and blunted sensibility which chronic insanity induces in so many of its victims, and still more the fact that no such absolute and universal separation of acute and chronic, as they picture to their minds, is intended. ”

“ Then there came a revulsion, and the weak woman, with a feeble voice, was transformed into a new creature; for the time being she was mad, and, with that madness came the fictitious physical and mental strength, the showing of which deceives all but those who are acquainted with such manifestations of mania. ”

“ If flight do not take place, and the leakage goes on, Soul itself is wasted, and Madness, with Horror at his gorgon side, waves his cruel baton, and another victim takes his or her place among the awful ranks of the Impotent, Barren, or Insane. ”

“ I believe none ever charged me with being wild and incoherent in my expressions, and though it is proverbial in the institution, among the patients and attendants, that if a man says he is not insane it is a sure sign that he is, so in consequence of this saying, I was careful to say nothing about my own mental condition, only to ask the attendants and doctors, at times, whether they observed marks of insanity in me. ”

“ Nothing can be worse than the common practice in public institutions of allowing idle visitors to amuse themselves by listening to, and of course encouraging, their conversation on the subject of their individual insanity.—When we do notice these delusions, and it must be seldom, it must be a very important and grave matter; and we must exert all our eloquence, and call forth the most overpowering arguments against the folly, wickedness and direful consequences of encouraging these delusions. ”

“ Take a madman, whatever the object of his madness—you will find that obscure and fixed idea which obsesses him seems to him the most natural thing in the world, and that, on the contrary, the real things which contradict this idea seem to him ridiculous and odious follies. ”

“ I have still some vague recollection of an endeavour I made to trace the character of the insanity in every case to some early trait of the individual in childhood, when, overcome by passion or overbalanced by excitement, the faculties run wild into all those excesses which in after years develop eccentricities of character, and in some weaker temperaments aberrations of intellect. ”

“ In one sense, indeed, their intellectual faculties may be termed unsound—they think and act under the influence of strongly excited feelings; and persons accounted sane are, under such circumstances, proverbially liable to error, both in judgment and conduct.” (For interesting cases of this form of madness, see Ray‘s Jurisprudence of Insanity.) ”

“ Those who have accumulated the largest sum of experience in disorders of the intellect, have viewed the various forms under which they are manifested, as equally conducing to render an individual incapable of conducting himself and managing his affairs, whether the mental affection be termed madness, melancholy, insanity, mental derangement, non compos mentis, idiotcy, or lunacy ”

“ It may suffice to state, that with the exception of those cases of insanity which arise from injuries, blood poisons, sympathetic irritations, and other sources of an unquestionably physical nature, the common causes of insanity are such as produce emotional changes, either in the form of violent agitation of the passions, or that of a chronic state of abnormal emotion, which pronounces itself in the habitually exaggerated force of some one passion or desire, whereby the healthy balance of the mind is at length destroyed. ”

“ During the period that my plan still remained a project, a thought struck me, which hardly could have penetrated an insane mind. This thought was concerning the danger of my experiment. Do you comprehend? Madness is a fire dangerous for jesting. Having thrown a match into a powder magazine, one may feel greater safety than if but the slightest thought of madness should steal into one's head. ”