TEMPERANCE COLUMN. ARTIFICIAL INSANITY.

Evening Post, Volume XLI, Issue 103, 2 May 1891, Page 1 (Supplement)

TEMPERANCE COLUMN. ARTIFICIAL INSANITY.

In his work on " The Pathology of the Mind," Dr. Maudsley thus describes the action of alcohol : — " Alcohol yields the simplest instance in the illustration of the disturbing action on the mind of a foreign matter introduced into the blood from without; here, where each phase of an artificially-produced insanity is passed through successively in a brief space of time, we have the abstract and brief chronicle of the history of insanity. Its first effect is to produce an agreeable excitement, a lively flow of ideas, and a general activity of mmd — a condition not unlike that which often precedes an attack of mania; aud there follows, as in insanity, sensory and motor troubles, and the automatic excitation ideas which start , up and follow one another without J order, so that more or less incoherence of thought and speech is , exhibited, while at the same time passion is easily excited, which takes different forms according to the individual temperaments ; after this stage has lasted for a time — in some longer, in some shorter — it passes into depression and maudlin melancholy, as convulsion passes into paralysis ; tho last stage of all being one of dementia and stupor. The different phases of mental disorder are compressed into a short period of time because the action of the poison is quick and transitory ; but we have only to spread the poisonous action over years, as the regular drunkard does, and we get a chronic and enduring insanity in which the foregoing scenes are more slowly acted. Or, if death, cutting short the career of the individual, puts a stop to the full development of the tragedy in his life, we may still have it played out in the lives of his descendants ; since the drunkenness of the parents sometimes becomes the insanity of the offspring, which thereupon, if not interfered with, goes through the downward course of degeneracy described."