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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    the insane teaches us what a power of self-control even they sometimes evince when they have a sufficient motive to exert it. The fear of suffering by yielding to their insane propensities suffices in many instances to hold them in check; the occasional concealment or actual denial of their delusions, if they have something to fear from the discovery of them, or something to gain by the concealment of them, testifies to a power over themselves which sane persons might sometimes envy. The descrip- tions of cases of suicidal and homicidal mania which I have given in foregoing chapters show how even desperate insane impulses have been successfully resisted for a time in some instances, and resisted altogether in other instances. It is, indeed, in consequence of the power of self-control which insane persons have, and of the way in which those who have the care of them elicit it, that asylums have become for the most part quiet and orderly institutions, instead of being places of disorder, fury, and violence. The beginning of recovery from mental derangement is always a revival of the power of will; such revival being possible forasmuch as the disease in many of its forms is unattended with organic morbid changes—is functional not organic. If the power then exists in the insane mind in such degree as to prevent the manifestations of madness, and, when aroused to action, to inaugurate recovery from it, is it not reasonable to suppose that it might, had it been properly trained and exercised originally, have sufficed to prevent its occurrence ? The pity of it is that the power is often least developed where it is most wanted.