Mania

“ The musical mania, therefore, causes us to speak in verse, and to act and be moved rythmically, and to sing in metre, the splendid deeds of divine men, and their virtues and pursuits; and, through these, to discipline our life, in the same manner as the inward manias coharmonize our soul. But the telestic mania, expelling every thing foreign, contaminating, and noxious, preserves our life perfect and innoxious, and banishing an insane and diabolical phantasy, causes us to be sane, entire, and perfect, just as the internal telestic mania makes the soul to be perfect and entire. ”

“ It was, nevertheless, but the husk of a man that was at last overpowered and carried to a distant bedroom. That complex heart still squirted liquid fire through every vein; but the brain was not; inherent mania had claimed its own. ”

“ I there say, “What is called mania and melancholia, are for the most part effects of the same power being overactive, but overactive in different directions.” If the distressing passions are overactive, we have melancholia,—if the animal propensities, we have furious mania,—and if the exhilirating passions, we have an exuberance of joyous activity. ”

“ You are still on the very threshold of life. I've been knocking about the world since I was sixteen, from one theatre to another. And my accursed disposition, my mania for concealing nothing, for refusing to lie, has helped make me worse than I really am. ”

“ Storms of hisses or bursts of ironical applause greet every sentence that he utters, and the curtain finally falls on his disgrace. This generally cures the disease of which we have been speaking. A night of agony, a week of pain, and the young gentleman, disenchanted and disenthralled, looks back upon his temporary mania with feelings of humiliation and surprise, cuts his aiders and abettors, and betakes himself seriously to the rational business of life.
But there are some stage-struck gentlemen whom nothing can convince of their total unfitness for the stage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet all the phenomena of possession point to maniacal, and not to harmless lunacy. The number of the cases of mania that occur bears but a small proportion to those of the latter form of derangement. It is true that at times of popular excitement various forms and numerous cases of frenzy manifest themselves ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The possibility of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the Creator," into a wild beast. ”

“ Fortunately, as stated, they were of brief duration; to examine them in detail were to touch the painful absurdities of incipient mania almost; that a lost collar stud could block his exasperated mind for hours, filling an entire day with emotion, while a deep affection of long standing could ebb towards complete collapse suddenly without apparent cause⁠ ⁠... ! ”

“ In sanity of mind, and in mania, the most philosophical distinction is based on the health or disease of memory. The ecstacy of madness may not seem perhaps more irrational than an ecstatic vision, but the maniac will not re-word the matter; whereas the mere visionary will repeat the action of the trance as a dream. ”

“ But there are still clearer cases—of tendencies not acquired or invented—when pleasure makes and dominates the process of disorganisation. Thus, during a certain period of the general paralysis of the insane, the patient believes himself to possess the supreme degree of strength, health, riches, and power; satisfaction and happiness are expressed in his whole bearing. Thus in certain forms of acute mania, on one side (which we shall pass over for the present) it shows itself in anger; on another, in exuberant spirits, abounding joy—a feeling of energy and vigour. ”

“ To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought ”

“ It may not be amiss to notice that the case does not present the point of what is called emotional insanity, or mania transitoria, that is, the case of one in the possession of his ordinary reasoning faculties, who allows his passions to convert him into a temporary maniac, and while in this condition, commits the act in question. ”

“ The anguish mania is an error of consciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, they are stimulated by pathological processes within the organism. ”

“ A mania of which the symptoms were essentially the same with those of the mania of 1720, of the mania of 1825, of the mania of 1845, seized the public mind. An impatience to be rich, a contempt for those slow but sure gains which are the proper reward of industry, patience and thrift, spread through society. ”

“ A form of mania is a consequence of it, where it has been neglected or badly treated; “of late years this species of madness has been more than ordinarily frequent.” All sorts were liable to it, but mostly valetudinarians, delicate persons, and those in the decline of life ”

“ But this definition applies equally to mania; for we every day see the most furious maniacs suddenly sink into a profound melancholia, and the most depressed and miserable objects become violent and raving. There are patients in Bethlem Hospital, whose lives are divided between furious and melancholic paroxysms, and who, under both forms, retain the same set of ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mania.—The term mania, meaning pathological elevation or excitement, has, like the term melancholia, been applied to all varieties of morbid mental conditions in which the prevailing mental symptom is excitement or elevation. ”

“ It is a form of emotional insanity, not loss of control of the will, but perversion of the will. Some are models in their lucid intervals, but when the mania is on them they cannot resist. The very act of taking constitutes the pleasure, not possession. ”

“ The term "mania" is limited to cases in which the general tone of feeling is altered in the direction of pleasure, a condition the true opposite of melancholia when the alteration is in a painful direction. In both mania and melancholia the change of feeling is primary and the intellectual disturbance present is secondary to the state of feeling. ”

“ The mania of social position habitually seizes upon persons of great affluence and small intelligence; it manifests itself early, often in a grave form: but it does not become virulent until middle life. With Mrs. Richmond the mania was aggravated by her not having been born to fashionable society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Insanity is a prolonged departure from the individual’s normal standard of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Mania is insane excitement.
Melancholia is the inability of the mind to react to any stimulus with other than gloom and depression.
Melancholia may be of the intellectual type or of the emotional type. The patient who tells you constantly that he has murdered all his children, that he is a criminal beyond the power of God to redeem, who seems chained to his delusions, yet shows no adequate feeling reaction, no genuine sorrow, we call a case of the intellectual type of melancholia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are written by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called “sane,” except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance. ”

“ The seeming obduracy of inanimate objects, when we try to disentangle their complications by means of anger, shows that emotional action may be quite absurd when applied to affairs of the intellect. A like suggestion of mania is observable in the cynicism which sees in human nature only different grades of rascality. ”

“ It has been remarked that those affected with furious mania recover in a larger proportion than those who suffer under the depressing influence of melancholy, but that when the maniacal and melancholic states alternate, the hope of recovery is farther diminished. ”

“ The madness next seizes the hands; and the unfortunate maniac writes what exhibits, in the most decided manner, the inflamed and delirious state of the brain. He falls into demoniacal convulsions, draws his sword, and fights with fury and desperation to the last gasp. ”

“ I may say, for your information, that there are, literally and mathematically speaking, 18 phases of insanity to which humanity is subject, ranging from the emotional insanity of commerce, to the popular mania a potu, vulgarly called delirium inebriosa. ”

“ Suppose now one of these cases, and suppose that the infirmity takes the form of some cruel, disgusting, or destructive disposition that may become at times overwhelming, and you have our universal trouble with sinful tendency, as it were magnified for examination. It is clear that the mania which defines his position must be the primary if not the cardinal business in the life of a lunatic, but his problem with that is different not in kind but merely in degree from the problem of lusts, vanities, and weaknesses in what we call normal lives. ”

“ Accompanying this mental excitement there is frequently persistent loss of sleep, constant restlessness, and great bodily activity, and indifference to or refusal of [Pg 18] food. Sometimes the brain excitement is so great that all self-control is lost, and the patient becomes a raving maniac.
The delusions of mania are largely of grandeur and self-exaltation; the patient thinks himself in the best of health, and very strong, or of a superior mind, or, that he is a great singer, poet, actor, or preacher ”

“ They could influence the passions of the mind—procure the reconciliation of friends or foes—engender mutual discord—induce mania and melancholy—or direct the force and objects of the sexual affections. ”

“ Upon examination he is found to be suffering from acute mania, alternating with periods of intense melancholia in which he invariably attempts to take his own life. His language when excited exceeds in obscenity anything ever heard. ”

“ For it is our experience that such sickness arises as often from want of concentration as any other cause. One of the noblest youths that ever trod this soil was wont to say, "he was never tired, if he could only see far enough." He is now gone where his view may be less bounded; but we, who stay behind, may take the hint that mania, no less than the commonest forms of prejudice, bespeaks a mind which does not see far enough to correct partial impressions. ”

“ And certainly he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare, an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought—it was all a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human nature!"—like the tolling of a muffled bell. ”

“ Notwithstanding the truth of all this, there are other cases,—cases of more sudden convalescence, where all this would shock and horrify, and produce a revulsion of feeling, most dangerous to them in their delicate and fragile state, and perhaps permanently fatal to their recovery. This is more particularly the danger in the incipient stage of convalescence in some violent cases of mania, [5] and where I am quite certain delicate and judicious attention have been essential ”

“ The dreadful change in the identity of the maniac—the maniac proper, the victim of brain-disease—is at least complete; so complete often as to force the idea of possession on minds reluctant to receive it. ”