Insanity

“ He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. ”

“ There is a universal insanity, that mistakes fable for fact throughout the entire round of the material senses; but this general craze cannot shield the individual case from the special name of insanity. Those unfortunate people, who are committed to insane asylums, are but well-defined instances of the baneful effects of illusion on mortal minds and bodies. ”

“ I call moral insanity that kind of disease which is super-induced on comparatively healthy minds by dwelling incessantly on one idea; the sort of disease which you find in women who have fallen into melancholy from love-disappointments; or in men for overweening ambition, hatred, or egotism—which latter, carried to a high pitch, invariably becomes a kind of insanity. ”

“ 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? ”

“ I shall have to show you a life, the sport of fate and circumstances, hurried along through shifting storm and sun, bright with trusting innocence and anon black with heartless villainy, a career which moves on in love and desertion and anguish, always hovered over by the dark spectre of INSANITY—an insanity hereditary and induced by mental torture,—until it ends, if end it must in your verdict, by one of those fearful accidents, which are inscrutable to men and of which God alone knows the secret. ”

“ He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. And then, if you plan it, he Changes organity, With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity— Driving your foes to the verge of insanity! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it an appalling thought that our normal mental life is thus intimately related to insanity, and graduates away into it by such fine transitions? A moment's reflection will show that the case is not so bad as it seems. ”

“ I know of no other reason, and I do not need any other; it is the only way we have of discovering insanity when it is not violent. It is merely the picturesqueness of his insanity that makes it more interesting than my kind or yours. ”

“ INSANITY, SURGERY, BLINDNESS.
Some who are willing to harden themselves against the laws of God and man alike, lay to heart the evidence of a standard medical treatise on insanity when it is opened and read to them in the street. The description of the brain of a dead lunatic, who lost his mind and his life as the wages of the sin upon which they are bent, brings a pallor over the faces of crowds that seem nailed down to the pavement and unable to move away. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The medicinal virtues of the fruits of charity are best proved amongst them. Grant that the disease arises from some remote or proximate ill-directed mental states. Why should we have more horror of insanity, than many other consequences of ill-regulated minds.—To me, the foul ward of some large public Hospital, is incomparably more horrible and loathsome.—p. 91Such direct consequences of wickedness present the object before us in an aspect that makes it difficult for us to exercise any feelings of commiseration towards them. Not so the insane! ”

“ Indeed this consciousness of insanity is the one diagnostic of sanity that never deceives me and, on the other hand, an obstinate persistence in the hypothesis of perfect rationality demonstrates the fact that insanity yet lingers in the convolutions and recesses of the brain, and that it would not be humane as yet to cast the patient on a world in which he would inevitably be taken some ungenerous advantage of. ”

“ A taint of insanity had affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad, and gentle, so utterly free from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies, unmolested by the world, with whose business or pleasures she had naught to do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. ”

“ This shows how near indeed the healthy mind ever hovers on the borderlands of insanity.
Man stands so close to the portals of insanity that he can look through the gateway, when he takes an introspective view of his psychical being, and can see the phantoms and mental ghosts of his insane personality. ”

“ Insanity, on the other hand, is probably a derangement of the mental organism akin to derangement of the physical organism, but not necessarily connected with or induced by the latter, for the bodily health of the insane is often entirely sound while the mind is in an entirely unsound and irrational condition. But the phenomena of insanity are too various and multiform, and too much dependent on both physical and moral causes, to afford any satisfactory proofs of the postulate which I propound in this essay. ”

“ It conjures up every phantom of superstition, and shapes it to the living form of its own passions and frenzies. In short, insanity could hardly devise more refinements in barbarity, or profligacy execute them with more malignant coolness. ”

“ But this procedure once more is an express appeal to your adversary’s own conception of Being as the standard by which you are to be judged. For the very conception of insanity is an empirical conception, and all that your assertion means, comes to an expression of opinion that metaphysical views, other than realistic ones, when seriously entertained, psychologically tend to the possible experiences now called insanity. ”

“ Is it possible that that insanity called love and jealousy does exist, and not only in the idiotic books of the ancients? What seems most strange is that I, I! . . . Equations, formulae, figures, and suddenly this! I can’t understand it, I can’t! ”

“ Every form of insanity, one may say, has a physiological prototype. Melancholia takes for its model the little depressive attacks of everyday life; mania has its prototype in the unrestrained enthusiasm of the baseball “fan”; and even the various forms of paranoia, the true insanity, have their typical representatives [Pg 92] among normal persons. To bring out this kinship we need no better example than that offered by the delusion of greatness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Further down are found the acknowledged "freaks" at the brink of insanity, who are but the extreme form of the unstable, and who, after having wasted haphazard much useless imagination, end in an insane asylum or worse still. ”

“ We call it insanity when external restraints are broken down and disregarded; we cannot decide how long absurd and delusive feelings and notions have monopolized all the operations of the little world within. I shall have occasion hereafter to adduce the history of many cases which will serve to illustrate the truth of these views. ”

“ The second and more common form of insanity, and that which it is often difficult to discover and pronounce upon with certainty, is that which I have called delusional or illusional. Its characteristic trait, its very essence, lies in this, that the insane man mistakes what he imagines for what is real; and he cannot be made to distinguish between imagination and reality, though the difference is obvious to an intellect in its normal state. ”

“ Much to my regret I never came across any violent cases of insanity during my stay in the country, though many times I observed strange peculiarities among the men, and signs of mania, more particularly religious. ”

“ For this purpose, striking and perilous situations are devised, or circumstances of strong moral excitement, a troubled conscience, partial gleams of insanity, or bodings of imaginary evil, which haunt the soul, and force it into all the agonies of terror. ”

“ There is, in the second place, a very common form of insanity, called the Delirium of Persecution. The sufferer imagines that everybody he passes notices him, suspects him of something, or even intends him some harm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Whether the spirit of an insane person is earth-bound, or not, depends entirely on the cause of the malady. If the insanity is due to long indulgence in vice, or if it is hereditary, then I think the spirit of the mad person is earth-bound ”

“ It is a case, where little insanity is observable in his conversation, but appears almost altogether in this constant propensity to indulge in destructiveness—breaking windows, tearing his clothes, &c. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course insanity is a striking disorder, and in default of the pathological explanation the savage regards the wild, wandering words and inexplicable actions of the sufferer as the words and actions of a demon, who has taken possession of the man's body, and driven his soul abroad or put it in abeyance. This theory of madness survived through all the centuries of Christian history until the advent of modern science. Mad people were chained up, exhibited as objects of derision, and often beaten unmercifully. It was the devil in them, as in the poor witches, that was treated in this fashion. ”

“ All these may be accounted for by a momentary insanity; for the characteristic symptom of human madness is the rising up in the mind of images not distinguishable by the patient from impressions upon the senses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have every reason to believe that, among civilized races, there is a vast amount of latent insanity. Taking the tables of our insane asylums, we find a thousand and one causes given as the exciting factors in the mental overthrow. Love, religion, anger, disappointment, etc., down through the long list of psychic and æsthetic emotions, until it seems as though even a breath of wind would be sufficient to destroy the mental equipoise.
Among savage and uncivilized races, insanity is of infrequent occurrence. ”

“ There are many species of insanity. All sin is insanity in different degrees. Sin is only spared from this Sin a form of insanity. classification, because its method of madness is in consonance with common mortal belief. Every sort of sickness is a degree of insanity; that is, sickness is always hallucination. ”