Temporary insanity

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is sheer madness; down-right insanity; and in that mood what worlds of wrong are daily done, and that, too, by people in whose hearts angels slumber, and long to be awakened, that their wings might fan the fevered brow, and lull the weary souls to rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a word, the finer the physical and nervous character, the more terrible the torment of sleeplessness. A little more and the patient is confronted with one of the most frightful forms of pain and terror, the consciousness of incipient insanity. ”

“ Terror dominated my brain, pulsed like molten fire through my blood, until, as the desperation of my situation became more clearly defined, I tottered upon the very verge of insanity, feeling I should soon become a helpless, gibbering imbecile. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, the whole imagination is seriously affected, and the most profound melancholy, together with a nervous fever, or, which is still more dreadful, with total insanity, are the inevitable consequences. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The mind passes from the control of the will, and wanders hither and thither, or persistently holds on in one channel of thought. Its action may become spasmodic and irregular in all degrees from slight aberrations, or excitement, up to incoherence and mental spasm; or from slight degrees of depression, down to almost inactivity and dementia: in short, such abnormal conditions of mental activity as constitute insanity. ”

“ He noticed that one's attitudes and emotions, such as anger, could affect one's health. He sometimes used suggestion and signs to help a patient form mental images, which translated into cures. He saw insanity as illness instead of possession by evil spirits. ”

“ In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which are melancholic or sanguine according to the character of the disease. But the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions of sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the patient to think that the present Me is an altogether new personage. ”

“ I was strongly reminded of his overwhelming dread of imagined dangers while reading lately the very important fact, that "the common causes of insanity are such as produce emotional changes, either in the form of violent agitation of the passions or that 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."—See Bucknill's Psychology of Shakspeare, p. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is this critical period of convalescence which is so important, and so difficult in the management of the insane.
I further observe, that the variation of temperature of the system, observed during paroxysms of insanity, is more like that produced by the passions in a state of excitement than that which accompanies inflammatory fever. It appears to fluctuate in quantity, and to be tumultuous in its distribution, in proportion as the exciting and depressing passions are active and contending with each other. ”

“ Murderers have assigned as the only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that “the Devil got into them,” and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair and calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The effect of fear on the brain may be to the extent of that which is produced by extremity of rage, so that even sudden death, from syncope, may ensue. I have known two such instances as these, but the more common effect is an intense irritability, followed by doubt, suspicion, and distrust, leading toward or to insanity. From a sudden terror deeply felt the young mind rarely recovers, never, I believe, if hereditary tendency to insanity be a part of its nature. ”

“ Regret, in itself a disease, but only of the intellect, soon changes into a more violent disease: into a disease of the constitution, which is fear, fear of insanity. In ordinary minds such disease takes the form of fear for [Pg 35] the future, of worry for existence; in extraordinary minds it takes more ghastly shapes,—distrust of friends, and dread of the close embrace of what is already stretching forth its claws after the soul,—insanity. ”

“ Many persons, universally considered as insane, will however, at times, act, speak, converse, and reason acutely on various subjects, until{248} some particular mental string or chord is touched. With respect to general prognosticks in insanity, we have been already copious and diffuse; and shall only add, that in some degree of mania, more favourable hopes are entertained than in gloomy melancholy: indecency, no intermissions or remissions, epilepsy, palsy, tabes, frenzy, are all inauspicious. ”

“ However, you are not unknown to me. I have heard you well-spoken of; and I remember that, when you were a student in Paris, you were mentioned with honor by the college, for an able paper read before the open section upon the very subject to [13] which I now propose to direct your attention,—mental disease," he added, after a moment's hesitation.
"A case of insanity?" bluntly asked the doctor.
"Heaven forbid! And yet I must not conceal from you that I fear it."
"Give me some of the symptoms. Insanity in strong development, or aberration of faculties, or hallucination?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes the appetites are also changed, or control over them is lost, and sometimes the moral nature is affected as well, sometimes a single faculty of the mind appears more disturbed than do others; it is, however, doubtful, or at least denied, that one faculty can show such disturbed mental action as to indicate insanity, and the rest of the mind appear perfectly healthy and normal. ”

“ Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of her disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.
More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,—scared to death, literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Now, in every way dreams imitate insanity. Not only are all the psychological symptoms of madness found in dreams—to such a degree that the comparison of the two states has become a commonplace—but insanity appears also to have its origin in an exhaustion of the brain, which is caused, like normal fatigue, by the accumulation of certain specific poisons in the elements of the nervous system. ”

“ I want to read about insanity and all that relates to it.”
A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror said this.
“Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,—all those large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what has set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any of her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright people very often have crazy relations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In severe cases of Graves' disease the patient is insane. Individuals under overwhelming emotion may be temporarily insane. Every clinician has seen great numbers of cases in which insanity is a phase of a disease, of an injury, or of an emotion. The stage of excitation in anesthesia is insanity. The only difference between what is conventionally called insanity and the fleeting insanity of the sick and the injured is that of time. We may conclude, therefore, what must be the brain-picture of the person who is permanently insane. ”