On the early phases of mental disorder, and their treatment / by W.B. Kesteven.

  • Kesteven, W. B. (William Bedford), 1812-1891.
Date:
[1881]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the early phases of mental disorder, and their treatment / by W.B. Kesteven. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of these limits can only be effected by the closest attention. No much more distressing state can be imagined or ex- perienced than that of the sense of impending insanity—the consciousness of coming madness, so accurately pourtrayed by Shakespeare’s “ King Lear.” “ Conscious of his mental state and its cause, he feels the goad of madness urging him on ; he struggles and prays against it, and strives to put it from him. He knows its cause to be unbounded passion, and prays in well known words for that moral control which would avert it.” This dread of approaching insanity, a common form of melancholy, is the outcome frequently of hypochondriasis. This latter is to be distinguished from melancholy. The distinction was well drawn by the distinguished physician Cullen. (See passage quoted in Bucknill and Tuke, 1862, p. 353.) Misanthropy, equally with melancholy, is, as Dr. Maudsley observes, “ Madness in the making. Hence it is that humour, which is always imbued with sympathy, is a higher and more wholesome quality than cynicism, which is always inspired by contempt.” We are here on the border-land of insanity—a region in which the soil is often found to consist of indolence and morbid selfishness; the produce yielded, desponding thoughts and melancholy reveries, which, for want of moral control or want of occupation, are suffered to overrun the mind with the deadly nightshade of imaginary horrors and evils. Despondency, which by a vigorous effort might be dispelled, gains strength by the concentration of atteiition upon self, and want of control of will over the thoughts. Morbid egotism thus thx’own upon its own emotional existence, imagines itself the centre of all observation, or becomes the slave of religious excitement, impulsive desires, imaginary fears, or illusive persecution, until, like Jaques, it will “ suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.” Jaques moreover, may furnish the distinction between hypochon- driasis or melancholy, and the melancholia of the insane. Dr. Bucknill, Ps3'chology of Shakespeare,” says : “ In him the judgment remained master of the direction of thought and the dilatation of feeling; he cherished his melancholy, but if he had thought fit to do so he retained the power to oppose, if not to ref>ress it.” Herein,” adds Dr. Bucknill, “ is the psychical difference between the sane and the insane melancholist,” with the additional essential difference that