Partial Insanity Research Articles

Melancholia. Historical evolution through a case report

IntroductionThe diagnosis of psychotic depression has its origin in the millennial term of Melancholia.ObjectivesA case of psychotic depression is presented to highlight its psychopathological characteristics and to make a historical overview of its origins.MethodsWe present the case of a 40-year-old male patient with a history of dysthymic mood who developed a major depressive mood, loss of self-care, decreased apetite, insomnia and repetitive speech with ideas of guilt and ruin of psychotic characteristics.ResultsMelancholy is a term used since the time of Hippocrates, who spoke of it as the state that appears after the prolongation of an intense period of sadness. It was extolled and self-attributed by authors such as Montaigne and branded as selfish by authors such as Cicero in the days when reason and madness formed a whole and distinguishing their limits was a complex task. Esquirol changed his name to Lypemania to get rid of its poetic nuances and framed it within partial insanity. Both he and the rest of the psychopathologists of the XIX century and early XX considered the melancholic as the great tormented, the one who despises himself and blames all ills, who suffers from apathy and above all presents a strong pain of the soul.ConclusionsLater it was Falret and Baillarger who unified melancholy with mania in what they nominate as circular and dual-form insanity. This gave way to the Krapelinian entity of manic-depressive insanity, the direct predecessor of the current Bipolar Disorder, which includes the diagnosis of our clinical case.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Partial Insanity and Other Mitigating Psychological Circumstances Under Albanian Criminal Law

Albanian criminal legislation gives a special place to the mitigating circumstances of a psychological nature applied to the perpetrators of criminal offenses. In the Albanian doctrine, the psychological state is considered part of the subjective component which in itself has, in essence, the existence or not of responsibility and the extent of the perpetrator's guilt. Referring to its formulation, the article of the Criminal Code providing for the mitigating circumstances mentions only one circumstance of a psychological character, psychiatric distress. The same relevance and legal treatment as the mitigating circumstances can be encountered in other institutes, such as the reduction of mental balance or the commission of a criminal offense in a state of intoxication. Thus, this manuscript analyzes the mitigating circumstances provided by the Albanian criminal legislation through the method of comparison while identifying the shortcomings in cases when these circumstances constitute at the same time general institutes of criminal law. Keywords: Albanian criminal law, mitigating circumstances, partial insanity, psychiatric distress, inebriation, narcotic intoxication, emotional state

ABOUT SOME PROBLEM ASPECTS OF LEGAL CATEGORY OF PARTIAL INSANITY

The article studies some problem issues rising with formation of criminal category of partial insanity in home legislation. Legislative attaching of this legal category at article 22 of Russian criminal code had passed along path of discussions and heated arguments that still in place. The study makes a primary accent at legal assessment of mental anomaly criminal personality and his responsibility realization mechanism in law enforcement activities. It is noted that when the identical crime is committed the extent of guilt and responsibility of such subjects could be different depending on intention matter, mental integrity and various external conditions. Personality of such criminal could be more dangerous than personality of healthy one because he has to control his behavior mechanisms more thoroughly. The article gives empirical data from different sources and reputable scientists’ opinions to prove author position. The article makes a conclusion that final mental anomaly criminal personality assessment differs from legislative position of Western European countries. Non-coordinations and gaps of such kind of criminal cases sentence realization that need further serious examination and adjustments remains in domestic legislation.

To the origins of the 'unitary psychosis' doctrine: from Aretaeus to V. Chiarugi

The concepts of the authors of 'unitary psychosis' doctrine preceeding the famous concepts of the XIX-th century authors J. Guislain, A. Zeller and W. Griesinger are analyzed. The beginnings of unitary psychosis doctrine are presented in the works of the antiquity period physician Aretaeus the Cappadician (II century), the founder of neurology, the English physician Thomas Willis (XVII century), the author of the term 'neurosis', the Scottish physician W. Cullen and the Florentine psychiatrist V. Chiarugi (XVIII century). The notions of partial and general insanity and some counter-arguments of the opponents of unitary psychosis concept are also discussed.

Elucidación epistémica e histórica del trastorno de la personalidad límite o borderline

IntroductionThe particularities of those that have been considered “hard cases” in the clinical field, and their relationship with personality disorders, are discussed together with their quintessential conceptual and diagnostic model: the borderline personalities. The aim of the study is to historically and epistemologically rebuild their origins within psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Methods and resultsFrom a classical epistemological and historical study, a brief tour is made through the nineteenth century alienism and the postulate of “partial insanity”. Next, a passage is spawned through the concepts that emerged from this postulate: “monomania” and “moral insanity”, up to mid-century Kraepelin and the “fundamental states” of manic-depressive insanity as pathological constitutional forms or characters, and reaching the twentieth century with characterology and psychopathic personalities. Finally, psychoanalysis is analyzed as the main source of borderline personality disorders arising from the problems encountered in analytical treatments and the development of the notion of “character neurosis”. ConclusionsBorderline personality disorders are the result of the conjunction of a number of factors, heirs of the notion of “partial insanity”, of the fundamental states of manic-depression insanity, of characterology, of the idea of constitutions and pathological personalities, together with the emerging concerns of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century

Le concept de l’insight en psychiatrie

It was in France (particularly in the Société Médico-Psychologique 1869 to 1870) that the concept of insight into mental disorder began to appear around the middle of the 19 th century. Amongst other things, changing views concerning the nature of insanity, particularly the emergence of the notion of partial insanity, led to debates about the question of insight in patients with mental illness. Following a resurgence of interest in insight in psychiatry numerous empirical studies have sought to explore the relationship between patients’ insight and clinical variables. Results however have been variable and contradictory. Explanations for this can be found in the complexities inherent to the concept of insight. In order to tease these out, it is essential to distinguish between the concept and the phenomenon of insight and to view insight as a relational concept. Clarifying these issues around insight helps to define the ways and limits in which it is possible to capture insight empirically. In addition, it facilitates an understanding of insight as a mental state whose fluctuations are dependent on an interplay of psychological, pathological and wider sociocultural factors.

Modern Examination of Insanity Defense in Criminal Law Under the Development of the Dynamic Psychiatry – From Categorization to Functionalism

In past, the common legal concept of insanity defense was a concept of categories. Accordingly, in order to prevent imposition of criminal liability upon the offender out of insanity, the offender should have been recognized as suffering of disease. Only if the mental disease could have been related to a specific list of diseases, the offender could have been considered as insane. Medical major developments and legal developments since the nineteenth century brought up changes in this concept. The dynamic psychiatry, which became major measure in mental disorder understanding, compelled a deep change in the former concept. It is argued, that any mental disorder should be examined functionally, and not by categories, as to the application upon the defense of insanity in criminal law. Only under functional examination, it is possible to seriously examine cases of temporary insanity or partial insanity. The article argues for the functional examination of mental disorder as the necessary measure to examine the applicability of the insanity defense in criminal law.

From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane arson in British, US and European contexts, c. 1800-1913. Part 1

This article surveys evolving and competing medico-legal concepts of pyromania and insane arson. Exploiting evidence from medical jurisprudence, medico-legal publications, medical lexicography and case histories, it seeks to explicate the key positions in contemporary professional debates concerning arson and mental derangement. A major focus is the application of the doctrines of moral and partial insanity, monomania, instinctive insanity and irresistible impulse to understandings of pyromania and insane arson. The limited extent to which mental defect provided a satisfactory diagnosis and exculpatory plea for morbid arson is also explored. Additionally, this article compares and contrasts contemporary debates about other special manias, especially kleptomania. Part 2 will be published in the next issue, History of Psychiatry 21 (4).

Lennard J Davis, Obsession: a history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 290, £14.50, $27.50 (hardback 978-0-226-13782-7).

Lennard J Davis, Obsession: a history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 290, £14.50, $27.50 (hardback 978-0-226-13782-7).

A Beautiful Mind

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessA Beautiful MindMary V. Seeman, M.D.Mary V. SeemanSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Sep 1999https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.50.9.1236AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This is a gripping book for the general public as well as for the mental health professional. It is the biography of John Nash, who in 1994 received the Nobel Prize in economics for his doctoral work—done several decades earlier, at age 21—on noncooperative game theory, the economics theory that currently dominates privatization, megamergers, big government, and international trade.What makes the story of John Nash so very unusual is that this young MIT mathematician, after publishing several brilliant, breakthrough mathematical proofs much marveled at and envied, developed, at age 30, a malignant form of schizophrenia that put a virtual end to his career in mathematics. Having given the world of economics the Nash equilibrium, John Nash lost his own mental equilibrium, resigned his professorship, and spent his time deciphering the cryptic meanings of numbers and signs, trying to dispose of his American citizenship, writing letters that made no sense, and eluding malevolent forces whose voices drummed in his head.After 35 years of partial insanity, John Nash, then approaching 70, went into remission and began doing mathematics again. Shortly thereafter, his admirers and intellectual debtors nominated him for the Nobel Prize.Sylvia Nasar, economics correspondent for the New York Times, traces his story from his childhood in West Virginia through his graduate years at Princeton and his faculty years at MIT before his breakdown. She paints a picture of an ambitious, intuitive, arrogant, socially awkward mathematics whiz who develops intense crushes on young men but who winds up with two women and a son by each. Although the story is mainly about John Nash, it also describes his family, his friends, and his colleagues and rivals amid the competitive world of pure mathematics. We get to know the two women, Eleanor and Alicia, each admirable in her own way. We get to know the two sons, both named John, one growing up in foster homes and poverty, estranged from his father, and the other, much loved and attended, a promising mathematician and brilliant chess player who succumbs to schizophrenia at age 17.We are also given a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that takes place at the Nobel committee level, how decisions are made and unmade, and how feverish the lobbying can be. Sylvia Nasar conducted more than a hundred interviews with those who knew John Nash intimately, she combed archives, and she sought out the writings of Robert Lowell, who was hospitalized at McLean Hospital during a period when John Nash was also a patient there. She read letters, postcards, and e-mail sent from John Nash to his mother and sister and to his colleagues. She talked with him personally.A Beautiful Mind is an attempt to understand many imponderables. That spark of creativity—where did it come from? That sudden descent into delusion—what caused it? The gradual return to health—what permitted it? The graver, earlier form of illness in the second generation—what determines it? The connection between genius and madness—does it exist?Dr. Seeman is Tapscott professor and chair of schizophrenia studies in the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.by Sylvia Nasar; New York City, Simon & Schuster, 1998, 437 pages, $25 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 50Issue 9 September 1999Pages 1236-1236 Metrics History Published online 1 September 1999 Published in print 1 September 1999

Charles Dickens's 'The Signalman': a case of partial insanity?

Charles Dickens's 'The Signalman': a case of partial insanity?

Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (review)

Reviewed by: Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court Jacques M. Quen Joel Peter Eigen. Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xv + 240 pp. $32.50. Following the examples of Nigel Walker and Thomas Forbes, 1 Joel Peter Eigen has carefully and thoroughly pored over the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. As Eigen explains: Beginning in 1674 these pamphlets report the trial outcomes of every prosecution at the Old Bailey, the London trial court that adjudicated felonies committed in the City and the contiguous county of Middlesex. . . . In 1775, the Common Council for the City of London ordered the publication of these papers, thereby institutionalizing a practice already undertaken by “enterprising commercial printers” who had dispatched shorthand writers to the Old Bailey to record the proceedings. (pp. 7–8) The author has selected several trials for particular review. He provides the reader with quantitative analyses and graphs to illustrate specific trends in that universe of 331 trials. This book is the result of many years of intensive review of primary source material with a particular focus on the history of English insanity pleas. Eigen is challenging, imaginative, and provocative. His book definitely is worth reading, but with two caveats. First, I believe that Eigen misconstrues Matthew Hale’s definition of partial insanity as consisting of “duration” of insanity (as if it is equivalent to “lunacy,” with its periods of lucidity punctuated by periods of insanity) and of “degree” (p. 179). Eigen quotes Hale’s definition of partial insanity: “Some persons that have a competent use of reason in respect of some subjects, are yet under a particular dementia in respect of some [other] particular discourses, subjects or applications; or else it is partial in respect of degrees” (p. 37; emphasis in original). Clearly the two variables intended by Hale were a generalized degree of insanity, and insanity manifested only on particular subjects (e.g., those who appear to be rational on all subjects but one or a few, such as the witness mentioned by Erskine in Rex v. Hadfield [1800] who appeared to be perfectly sane on all subjects until Erskine alluded to his identity as Jesus Christ). This is equivalent to Esquirol’s “intellectual monomania,” 2 or what some present-day psychiatrists would call an “encapsulated delusion.” Duration is neither mentioned nor alluded to by Hale in his discussion of partial insanity in his History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), nor did he ever indicate that he would have departed from the traditional view that lunatics were lawfully responsible for their behavior during their periods of lucidity and not responsible during their episodes of insanity. In his book Institutes [End Page 315] of the Laws of England (1853 reprint), Edward Coke explicitly included the idea that insanity could be of limited duration; this type of insanity was one of the four classes of non compos mentis included in his discussion of Beverly v. Snow. My second caveat refers to Eigen’s assertion that “witnesses in English courts were traditionally permitted to impart only such ‘knowledge’ of the crime as they had apprehended through sensory impressions. Only ‘facts’ that the witness had directly experienced—that he or she saw the accused fleeing the scene, heard the gunshot, smelled the sulfur escaping from the pistol barrel—could be reported to the court” (pp. 110–11). He cites, as his authorities, John Henry Wigmore, Evidence in Trials at Common Law (1985); Judge Learned Hand’s paper on “Historical and Practical Considerations Regarding Expert Testimony,” Harvard Law Rev., 1901, 15: 45; and James Bradley Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898), esp. pp. 194–97. These were all commentators on American, not British, law. New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Charles Doe, in his dissenting opinion in State v. Pike (1869; pp. 408–44), presented his carefully documented study of the British legal tradition on this issue and concluded that the British did allow opinion testimony by lay or “fact” witnesses; this practice, he explained, gave the jury access to the best available evidence. He identified Poole v. Richardson (1807), an early Cambridge, Massachusetts, probate case...

From Beasts to Bedlam: Hadfield, the Regency Crisis, M'Naghten and the “mad” Business in Britain, 1788–1843

This article explores the significance of the Hadfield case to the British legal system's views on criminal insanity. Hadfield's successful defense is analyzed in connection with the “regency crisis” involving King George III, whose enlightened views of the treatment of the insane, following his own “recovery” through the ministrations of the “mad doctors” of the time, had a profound influence on both the case and general societal attitudes toward the mad. Hadfield's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate George resulted in a trial at which Thomas Erskine was able to secure for the first time in British history the “statutory special verdict,” a defense of partial insanity.

Delusion in the courtroom: the role of partial insanity in early forensic testimony

Delusion in the courtroom: the role of partial insanity in early forensic testimony

Melancholia and partial insanity.

In the medical literature of the eighteenth century melancholia came to be defined as partial insanity. Seventeenth-century English law introduced the term and influenced later forensic concerns about the concept. But the history of melancholia reveals a gradual development of such a concept of limited derangement associated with the delusions usually cited in accounts of this disease. In the early nineteenth century the relationship of melancholia and this concept weakened and was gradually abandoned, the content of the syndrome of melancholia was reduced, and out of this complex process emerged the notion of monomania.

Partial Insanity as Affecting the Degree of Crime--A Commentary on Fisher v. United States

Partial Insanity as Affecting the Degree of Crime--A Commentary on Fisher v. United States

Partial Insanity As Affecting the Degree of Crime. A Commentary on Fisher v. United States

Partial Insanity As Affecting the Degree of Crime. A Commentary on Fisher v. United States

Partial Insanity

Partial Insanity

Suicide in St. Paul's Cathedral

The Service of Reconciliation in St. Paul's Cathedral on October 13th, 1890, is so remarkable an event in psychological and ecclesiastical history that it ought not to pass unrecorded in this Journal. During the previous month, Edward Easton attended the Sunday service, committed suicide by shooting himself, and died in the consecrated edifice. At the inquest the jury found a verdict of suicide “whilst temporarily insane,” which to the unlegal and uncanonical mind would seem to divest the circumstances of the taint of crime as much as if the man had broken a blood vessel. It cannot be the blood in itself that renders reconsecration, or rather reconciliation necessary; it must be the supposition that there had been some infraction of the moral law. However, after the careful consideration of precedents, the Dean and Chapter presented a petition, in which it is stated that they had been advised that the cathedral had been, “by such act of self-murder, and by the blood-shedding consequent thereupon, polluted and defiled.” To this petition the Bishop of London replied, and by virtue of his episcopal authority declared “the said Cathedral Church to be exempt and reconciled from all canonical impediment, and from every profanation contracted and incurred by, or through, the aforesaid acts of suicide and blood-letting for ever.” In this quaint phraseology it is curious to note the event is recognized as involving two acts. The Bishop acted under the advice of the Chancellor, Dr. Tristram. In justification of his advice he makes a very singular observation: “The evidence at the inquest established a case of partial insanity or suicidal mania; there was none to show that he was otherwise of unsound mind.” It is to be regretted that the Chancellor should express an opinion on a subject he knows nothing about. As well might a physician pronounce an opinion upon an obscure point of law. But this is the way with the lawyers. They are as much at home in the philosophy of the human mind and its pathology as if they had studied medical psychology for a lifetime. The service consisted of an anthem, a short address from the Bishop, followed by his direction to the Registrar to read the petition of the Dean and Chapter. Then the Litany and 51st Psalm were next read, and the latter portion of the Commination Service was read. When the prayers were concluded the Registrar read out the Sentence of Reconciliation. While it is admitted that in the Canon Law of both the Eastern and Latin Churches an obligation to pursue this course existed, and was therefore in force up to the time of the Reformation, it would seem that it was not imperative upon the Bishop to act as he did. Since the Reformation there is no mention of a single instance of the performance of this remarkable service. Dr. Tristram believed that the public desired to have the ceremony performed. The Times was of opinion that there was no general wish for such a service. On the contrary, their correspondence supported the belief that the Bishop, Dean, and Chapter would have exhibited more prudence if they had ignored the suicide and allowed the services to go on in the usual way.