Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Maudsley, Henry, 1835-1918.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ence, that such a form of disease must sometimes occur. In some of these cases of impulsive insanity little or no mental derangement, apart from the morbid idea or impulse, has been noticed. This is expressly stated and forcibly insisted upon by their narrators; but in most cases I believe it will be found, on an intimate knowledge of the person's feelings and do- ings, that there is more derangement than appears on the surface. His whole mental tone is more or less affected, so that his feelings are blunted or changed, the natural interests of life extinguished, and his judgments of his relations to others and of their relations to him somewhat impaired; he is apt to become suspicious of and hostile to those who have been his nearest friends and acquaintances, and may finally get delusions concerning them. Our beliefs, sane or insane, are not the results of reason, but have their roots in that unconscious part of our nature, of the state of which the feelings are the indices. It is from the feelings, too, that the impulses to action spring, the function of the intellect, like that of the steersman at the ship's helm, being regulative, and the insane impulse of the homicidal patient is the deranged offspring of a deranged affective hfe. It is surprising sometimes how sane a person may appear who all the while has a greater derange- ment than was ever suspected, until something hap- pens to elicit the evidence of it. When he with- draws from his accustomed occupations, and lives a