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.

    297/356 (page 261)
    COMPAEISON OF SYMPTOMS'. declares itself in the loss of power of comparison of ideas and in the incoherence of senile dementia. To these stages of failure of intellect we may add the decline of the moral faculties which commonly accompanies old age, a decline which, in dementia, may reach the stage of com- plete extinction of them. It appears then from what has heen said that the charac- ters of senile dementia mark a further stage of the same kind of degeneration which is exhibited in the earliest symptoms of the mental decay of old age. It must not be supposed, however, that the transition from the latter to the former state takes place in every case, or that when it does take place, it is always a quiet and gradual decline. In some cases the occurrence of actual dementia is ushered in by a condition of excitement which gives a factitious energy to the individual, deceiving per- haps himself and his friends; he may suddenly exhibit an extraordinary activity in business or in speculation, making sales or investments of a startling kind, or he m&y break out into sexual, alcoholic, or other excesses ; impatient of advice or opposition, he resents all interference or control, and sometimes occasions, by his conduct, no little distress and perplexity to his family. The excitement is really a sort of outburst of expiring energy, and is followed by dementia, the transition from the one to the other being sometimes quite sudden. It is interesting to note that very similar mental symptoms to those which are produced by the brain- decay of old age may be produced by other causes which inflict damage, temporary or permanent, upon the brain.