Lunatics who Feign Insanity.

Otago Witness, Issue 2164, 15 August 1895, Page 49

Lunatics who Feign Insanity.

" One would think thai; the last thing a really insane person would need or wish to do would bo to pretend to be crazy," said an expert on insanity the other day. " All insane people, however, have one peculiarty in common, no matter how diverse their symptoms are— nono of them knows that he is crazy. In faot, a lunatic generally considers himself the most sane person in the neighbourhood. Hence, when a madman wishes to protect himself, as after committing some crime, one of the first things he often does is to feign insanity.

"For instance, a madman commits a murder. On arrest, he begins to act in a way that seems to indicate lunacy, but close watching betrays the fact that he is shamming. This has usually been regarded as conclusive evidence of his sanity. It is really nothing of the kind. Doctors know now that a lunatic will sham madness as quickly as a sane man, and his shamming, being often clumsily done, is much more apt to be found out.

" Crazy people when feigning generally imitate a different kind of insanity from that with whioh they are really afflicted. Thus in a recent caso a demented pauper was accustomed to proclaim loudly that he was insane, having been made so by an accumulation of tar and grease in his head. This was entirely sham, the man having found that it drew attention to him and gained him presents or tobacco. His real hallucinations he kept carefully in the background.

"The desire to attract attention is very strong on the part of some lunatics, and it is possible that in many of the cases that interest visitors at asylums where the patient asserba that he is Queen Victoria or Julius Caasar the whole thing is a sham.

" In one recorded case an asylum patient was much annoyed by finding that a companion, who claimed the authorship of some of Shakespeare's plays, attracted the attention of visitors. He accordingly went one better by asserting that he had written all the works of Byron, Shelley, and Milton. This claim, he admitted to the physicians, was fraudulent, and he made it to visitors ouly.

" This peculiarity of lunatics mades tho task of a modern expert on insanity doubly hard. He has to deal not only with sane persons protending to be insane, and with insane persons pretending to be sane, but with lunatics who feign insanity. By skilful examination and crossexamination he has to elicit the truth from all these unwilling witnesses. His task is scarcely an enviable one."