Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    and appreciate its insane reasonings. The delusion is not itself the disease, it is only a striking symptom of the disease; and it is certain that the criminal act may be a manifestation of the disease of which the delusion is a symptom, and that no connection between them may be detectable by a looker-on, notwithstanding the ex- istence of a real pathological connection. (c) When an insane delusion exists in the mind, how- ever circumscribed the range of its action may seem to be, the rest of the mind is certainly not sound; on the contrary, it is in a condition in which not only do impulses that are in relation with the delusion acquire an irresistible force, but in which unaccountable impulses spring up without relation to it. Outside the recognised circle of morbid ideas there will be found, if a sufficiently careful examination be made by a competent person who knows the individual or knows the disease, evidence of mental disorder—evidence of such loss or perversion of natural feelings, such change of character and habits, such excitability of disposition, with loss of self-control, and such weakening of mind, as constitute a general alienation apart from the particular delusions. He is centred in himself, and it is a morbid self; social feelings wane or are extinguished; his intelligence is so far weakened that what he perceives at once to be the grossest folly in another, he cannot perceive to be any folly in himself; if he be sent to an asylum, it is extra- ordinary how little able he seems to be to realise why he is there, and, in some instances, what a strangely im- perf»ct appreciation he shows of the derangement of other