Forms Of Mental Illness Research Articles

Gastro-intestinal symptomatology in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a prevalent form of mental illness and gastro-intestinal symptomatology in relation to this illness is frequently encountered. Recognition of the personality disorder is important in order to effect a scientifically oriented therapeutic approach aimed not only at treatment of symptoms but involving the personality as a whole.

Investigations into the Significance of the Endocrines in Involutional Melancholia

The question whether involutional melancholia in females can be regarded as distinct form of mental illness representing a reaction to bodily changes following the menopause has been amply discussed. It has been held by some that such a melancholia is no more than one phase of the manic-depressive psychosis (1, 2). Others hold the opposite view and justify it on statistical and clinical grounds (3).

Melancholia: Prognostic Study and Case-Material

I hope it will not be a waste of time to begin by seeing what can be meant by prognosis in this difficult kind of illness. Prognosis is often conceived as the natural history of disease—or the course it will follow if it is not interfered with. Treatment is valued for the good modification it produces in this “natural” course of events; it may hurry up the processes of recovery or it may bring about recovery that would not otherwise occur, or it may lessen the harm the disease does; in other words, the efficacy of treatment is assessed by the changes produced in the time the illness takes and the shape it takes. In the case of such a disease as malaria, this conception of prognosis, and this use of it for assessing treatment, can be demonstrated. In psychiatry, however, one is not as a rule dealing with parasites, bacteria, or other exogenous agents which live and exert their influence in a definite order of time and place. Causes of mental illness have no set sequence or constancy. Those external to the patient are as variable and manifold as the pattern of daily life around us, and those intrinsic in him are seldom capable of forcing their way and becoming manifest as illness, no matter what befalls the patient. They are for the most part dependent on circumstance, and of their particular transmission and manifestation we know little; we infer hereditary and constitutional causes with good grounds, but of the details of heredity in any of the individual forms of mental illness we cannot be sure. Consequently we cannot find now any accuracy of prognosis, in the sense of predictable sequence in an individual, based on comparable experience of many others; the variations will be too many; we may expect such accuracy when we know more of the nature and mode of transmission, and of the influence of external circumstances upon time and form and degree of manifestation of each kind of mental illness. Without accurate knowledge of how the causal and modifying factors act, prognosis must be uncertain to a greater extent than in many other illnesses. In medicine, it is true, prognosis can hardly ever be exact, but here it is more inexact than usual.

To casuistry of periodic paranoia

Abstracts. Psychiatry.Dr. med. P.A.Ostankov. To casuistic periodical paranoia, Jubilee collection of works on psychiatry and neuropathology, dedicated to V. M. Bekhterev T. I. 1903, St. Petersburg.In view of the severity of the clinical picture of periodic paranoia, as well as the lack of casuistry published up to the present time in the literature, the author writes off in his article another case of this form of mental illness, observed by him in the clinics of mental illness in 1900.

Prof. S. S. Korsakov "Bed keeping during the treatment of acute forms of mental illnesses and the changes caused by them in the organization of institutions for the mentally ill". Journal of neurops. and psychiatr. named after S. S. Korsakov. 1901 book. I and II

Having cited in detail the Russian literature on bed keeping, the author noted the fact that the contradictory views on bed keeping occur apparently from the confusion of understanding about bed keeping, as a healing method and as a special system. Having indicated for the first time such a difference, the author analyzes the issue in detail from these two sides. The main principle of the system of bedding should be the creation in the hospital of that "atmosphere", which by itself contributes to the fact that the mentally ill use the content in bed as much as they need.

On various Superstitions in the North-West Highlands and Islands of Scotland, especially in relation to Lunacy

Arthur Mitchell discusses several sites, rituals and superstitions in the Highlands and Islands that are alleged to have curative properties for those suffering from various forms of mental illness. He argues that these beliefs may be remnants of a pre-Christian religion. He also discusses anecdotal and written evidence of other treatments for mental illness that are motivated by the association between mental illness and demonic possession. There is also discussion of the burial rites of people who took their own life. Mitchell is critical of all these practices but reminds his audience that similar cures had been used within living memory at the time of writing and some were even still in use.