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In contemporary usage, the term insanity is an informal, un-scientific term denoting "mental instability"; thus, the term insanity defense is the legal definition of mental instability. In medicine, the general term psychosis is used to include the presence of delusions and/or hallucinations in a patient; [ 1 ] and psychiatric illness is ...
The terms "mental breakdown" or "nervous breakdown" may be used by the general population to mean a mental disorder. [20] The terms "nervous breakdown" and "mental breakdown" have not been formally defined through a medical diagnostic system such as the DSM-5 or ICD-10 and are nearly absent from scientific literature regarding mental illness.
The term "crazy" (from Middle English meaning cracked) and insane (from Latin insanus meaning unhealthy) came to mean mental disorder in this period. The term "lunacy", long used to refer to periodic disturbance or epilepsy, came to be synonymous with insanity. "Madness", long in use in root form since at least the early centuries AD, and ...
Together with The Insanity in Ancient and Modern Life, the medical book The Past and Present Provision for the Insane Poor in Yorkshire considers the differences in prevalence among upper and lower social classes. Finally, he became an editor of the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, being the most cherished psychiatric work of the 19th century.
Contemporary misunderstanding of the term derives from the double meaning of the word "moral" in the nineteenth century context. According to Erdmann Mueller in a comprehensive 1899 treatise on moral insanity: "the word moral in the concept moral insanity is derived from the word affective in Esquirol's terminology, and the translation of moral as virtuous or ethical is the result of a ...
Sanity (from Latin: sānitās) refers to the soundness, rationality, and health of the human mind, as opposed to insanity.A person is sane if they are rational.In modern society, the term has become exclusively synonymous with compos mentis (Latin: compos, having mastery of, and Latin: mentis, mind), in contrast with non compos mentis, or insanity, meaning troubled conscience.
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Aboulomania (from Greek a– 'without' and boulē 'will') [1] is a mental disorder in which the patient displays pathological indecisiveness. [2] [3] The term was created in 1883 by the neurologist William Alexander Hammond, who defined it as: ‘a form of insanity characterised by an inertness, torpor, or paralysis of the will’.