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The article discusses, several writers maintain that one omits to a or refrains from A-ing only if one is able to A.1 I'll first consider this claim, together with related claims concerning beliefs about one's abilities. Next I'll turn to whether there can be freedom in omitting to act, as there can be freedom in acting, and, if so, how it might be understood.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction, Schizophrenia, Cognitive Behavioural Models of Psychosis, CBT for Psychosis, Assessment within CBT, The Evidence Base for CBT for Psychosis, References [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction, Developing CBT for Psychosis, The Insomnia Intervention Protocol, A Clinical Example from the Pilot Study, Summary, References [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article "The Crisis VII" taken from the book "The Writings of Thomas Paine," Volume I, collected and edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. It stresses that there are stages in the business of serious life in which to amuse is cruel but to deceive is to destroy that England has long been under the influence of delusion or mistake. The country needs no other proof than the unexpected and wretched situation.

The article presents a reprint of the article "The Crisis XII" taken from the book "The Writings of Thomas Paine," Volume I, collected and edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. It notes the speech, which has been printed in several of the British and New York newspapers coming from lordship in answer to Duke of Richmond. It emphasizes that his lordship is a total stranger to the mind and sentiments of the U.S. that has wrapped himself up in fond delusion.

Chapter 28 of the book "Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing: Concepts of Care in Evidence-Based Practice" is presented. Various types of schizophrenic and related psychotic disorders are identified. Nursing diagnoses were formulated based on the nursing assessment data and a plan of care was developed including a critical pathway of care for the client as a guideline for nurses who follow a program of case management. Treatment modalities for schizophrenia were discussed.

A definition of the term "psychotomimetic drugs" is presented. It refers to chemical agents that reliably and dose-dependently induce a psychosis, often including hallucinations and delusions in normal individuals. A psychotomimetic effect of this kind is seen after high doses of atropine or scopolamine, drugs which blocks muscarinic cholinergic receptors.

The establishment of lunatic asylums is indeed a noble work of charity, and will confer greater honor on the names of our Indian rulers than the achievement of their proudest victories. The history of asylums in India provides an opportunity to study the spread of ideas about mental illness, and notions of care and responsibility for the mentally ill across cultures and time. Although there are suggestions that hospitals have been known in the south Asian region from antiquity, there is little documentary proof of their existence. References for institutions for the sick and needy can be found during the reign of Ashoka (268–231 BC). Travellers' accounts of AD 400 mention similar services established by rich merchants and nobility. Mental hospitals had a long history in the Arab world, and the growing Muslim influence in India lead to the establishing of similar hospitals. However, the prevailing social situations have led some authors to suggest that these were seldom used except by ‘soldiers and foreigners’. Medical care in medieval India was based on Ayurvedic (derived from the Charak Samhita and other classical Indian and largely pre-Islamic texts, thus predominantly Hindu) and Unani (the Muslim school of medicine), and derivative systems, delivered by professionals trained by study and apprenticeship. These professionals were most often attached to the court, or provided services for a fee. Religious and caste divisions perhaps did not allow a public space for uniform treatment for the ill to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's European population arrived in 1788, transported from the British Isles to establish New South Wales as a penal colony. In the first few years of settlement, David Collins, legal advocate on the First Fleet and chronicler of the early history of the colonies, commented on the existence of insanity among convicts. Policies, legislation and practices surrounding insanity in the different Australian colonies developed over the next ten decades. Subsequent histories of the insane in nineteenth-century Australia, following the trajectory of British scholarship on asylumdom, have largely been explored through institutional records. Historians have been interested in exploring the broad concept of asylum committals, and have considered the relationships between agencies of the law, including police and the courts, families and asylums. The custodial character of the colonial asylum meant that ‘public disturbances’ could result in asylum committals, rather than imprisonment, for women and men. Colonial policing practices of detection and surveillance, and the policing of sex and race, were central to the apprehension of lunatics. Families negotiated with the police in many instances, and the police played roles as intermediaries between the asylum and the families of lunatics. This chapter examines the development of policing practices around lunacy and the asylum in the colony of Victoria in the nineteenth century. The history of the asylum in colonial Victoria was not unique, and is usefully compared to the histories of other Australian colonies and also the colony of New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In 1933, Gustav Blume, a psychiatrist at the Wittenauer Heilstätten Asylum in Berlin, wrote: It is no secret to say that reading psychiatric case reports is not an unspoiled pleasure. Often it is a hopeless torture! I am not talking about the content of the reports, but about the technical process of reading them. For example, you have to work out a case history of an old schizophrenic, which covers some 20 to 30 years and more than a dozen stays in different hospitals. You sit worried in front of a chaotic package of more or less faded, damaged, and mostly loose sheets of paper from which stacks of illegible and crumpled letters and papers emerge. You try unsuccessfully to find out where the case history begins, where the most recent entries can be found; you reorganise, sort, and take notes. You dig deep into the scientist's last reserves of courage and dive into the stormy sea of faded or fresh hand-written psychiatrists' notes, and – you finally collapse. You then despair (or become enraged, depending on your temperament) of decoding your colleagues' notes and you are driven over the precipice to complete frustration. To document a case history by handwriting required a slower pace of life compared with today. To then read these old-fashioned entries, however, is impossible for the modern rational man in a time of portable typewriters. He refuses to do this as an enormous waste of time and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Robben Island, an island off the southern coast of South Africa barely six miles from Cape Town, the capital city of the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, accommodated ‘lunatics’, ‘lepers’ and the ‘chronic sick’ for nearly a century after 1846. The ‘General Infirmary’ was established just eight years after the emancipation of slaves was finalized, at a time when the colonial government and a nascent middle class in Cape Town were trying to impose a new order on the undisciplined urban underclass in preparation for self-rule. The Cape's most dangerous insane were sent to the island asylum from 1846, that, until 1875, was the only asylum in the colony. By 1921, there were a number of other asylums established: Grahamstown (1875), Port Alfred (1889), and Fort Beaufort (1894) in the Eastern Cape, and Valkenberg (1891) near Cape Town. While Britain and some of her colonies provided extensive provision for the insane, the Cape did not. Most of the colonial insane were cared for at home or through private boarding arrangements: only the most desperate resorted to the asylum. In 1890, the proportion of registered white insane to the white population at the Cape was 1:1,180, about three times lower than that in Ireland, New Zealand, New South Wales, Victoria and Britain (from 1:294 to 1:380). There was also a much larger proportion of people classified as ‘criminal’ insane in the Cape than in Britain or New South Wales, although in New South Wales and elsewhere, police were still responsible for a large proportion of asylum committals before 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in the history of nineteenth-century psychiatry has explored the expanding powers of the medical profession and the proliferation of the asylum, that ‘magic machine’ for curing insanity. This medicalization of madness has usually been portrayed as a ‘top-down’ process: ‘social control imposed from above with greater or lesser success on a population now the unwitting object of medical encadrement’. But as historians have begun to study individual asylums and the complexities of committal, more emphasis is being placed on the role played by families in the process. Asylum doctors, it has been suggested, merely confirmed a diagnosis of insanity already made by families, by neighbours, or by non-medical authorities. Consequently, as the American historian Nancy Tomes has argued, ‘the composition of a nineteenth-century asylum population tells more about the family's response to insanity than the incidence or definition of the condition itself’. Such arguments imply a more ‘dynamic and dialectical’ interpretation of the process of medicalization, one that requires a careful assessment of family demands for medical services and the degree to which these demands were met, willingly or unwillingly, by the emerging psychiatric profession. Asylum records, although difficult to interpret, can shed some light on family decisions to ‘take the road to the asylum’; this is particularly true in the case of so-called voluntary committal, where families could avoid the involvement of the police or judicial authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is an episodic disorder of thought organization and content which manifests itself overtly in psychotic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), in thought disorder, in cognitive disturbances, and in reduced mental activity, including goal-directed thought and socialization. The last 20 years have produced an exponential growth in our understanding of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. The availability of increasingly sophisticated brain imaging and molecular approaches have made it possible to investigate the structure and function of the human brain under both normal and abnormal conditions. Although the genetic component of this disorder has remained elusive, brain imaging studies have demonstrated that schizophrenia probably involves multiple brain regions, including the prefrontal region, anterior cingulated cortex, hippocampus and amygdala. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chapter five of the book "Outsiders Together: Virginia & Leonard Wolf" is presented. It gives explanation that every rational and civilized man is aware that not very far below the surface of his mind there lurks a savage, primitive instinct of self-glorification. It also notes that the reason behind the feeling will teach us that it must be a delusion and a superstition.

Focuses on the collective or mass hallucinations which occurred under certain conditions. Examples of mass illusion and hallucinations; Factor which leads hallucinatory feelings into a real hallucination; Condition in which initial illusions could also serve as a cause for the development of mass hallucinations.

Behavioral treatments for hallucinations and delusions, aggressive and destructive responses, inappropriate social behavior, poor self-care and grooming, and deficient recreational and vocational skills in chronic psychiatric patients are reviewed. Consideration is given to the short-term, long-term, and generalized effects of these interventions. Three case studies illustrate behavioral procedures of consumable reinforcement, response cost, graphic feedback; differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO), and overcorrection. The potential contribution of clinical social workers in applying such programs on a psychiatric unit is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section examines the levels of psychotic experience in order to understand the end-of-the-world imagery. These levels are: the external event; the shared theological imagery, or eschatology, that renders such imagery acceptable as it is imbued with meaning which gives it structure; and the internal derangement--the intrapsychic disintegration or personal armageddon of psychosis found especially but not exclusively in certain schizophrenic disorders. The schizophrenic inserts into his lurid delusional system a kind of colorless rider-clause--an ingredient which represents a denial of the finitude of life. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud attributed the severity of schizophrenic symptoms to the predominance of narcissism. He spoke both of fixation points for the libido at its earliest phases of development, as well as regression to this primitive narcissism to which dementia praecox returns in its final outcome. Guilt begins with the developing sense that one is responsible for, indeed the cause of, the annihilation that threatens. Self-blame is inevitable in those who become schizophrenic. Guilt contributes greatly to the schizophrenic's collusion in the murder of his self, but he also feels guilty for having done so.

This section discusses the use of the concept of projection in analyzing a case of chronic paranoia. Ecology of delusion often happens with very chronic psychotic patients who are emotionally frozen that when they improve and an opening for communication appears, the new de-frozen climate may be experienced as a catastrophic state of de-glaciation in which the danger of a prehistoric flood bursts out. When time that had been blocked or frozen, with regression to glacial time, begins once again to flow, this is often conveyed through a frenetic incoherent movement of an alienated and paralyzed ego which desires to experience warmth and freedom, but is not yet able to control this transformation with the appropriate degree of de-glaciation. The atmosphere of the psychotic's disturbed and nightmarish vision of the world appears in paranoid schizophrenia. The hypochondriac patient shares with the paranoid the fact that there appears to be something external to the mind which makes him ill. In the same way as the paranoid patient puts fear into others, making them afraid of him, the hypochondriac gets rid of bodily anxiety or anguish through projecting it into other people--thereby making them worried and upset.

Presents a psychiatric case of a patient whose political delusion revolves around several ideas. Principal elements of the his delusion; Importance of sexuality in the utopia of the patient; Features of reification.

Investigates the delusional influencing machine perceived by schizophrenic patients. Effects of the influencing machine on patients; Description of the phenomena produced by the schizophrenic influencing machine; Case studies on the schizophrenic phenomenon.

The diaphanous nature of consciousness (as experienced by its owner) is more than matched by its opaqueness to analysis and description. And yet a descriptive psychopathology which did not include this concept would be difficult to imagine. Thus, during the nineteenth century, many ‘mental symptoms’ were defined in terms of introspective data from consciousness (e.g. hallucinations, depersonalization, dejd vu, etc.). The subjectivity of the madman became a private theatre where phantasms played dramas to which the psychiatrist had no direct access. All he could do was get the privileged seer to describe the experiences and then believe that the patient was telling the truth. It goes without saying that such belief is based on the assumptions that consciousness exists and that the patient's descriptive capacity has been spared by the disease. But in clinical practice things are more complicated than that. Sensations, images, feelings and impulses, often odd or never experienced before, must be recognized and put into words by a person who is simultaneously bemused, confused, upset, terrified or who may actually be participating in the inner drama. Therefore, what the psychiatrist may get is a prosaic, analogical, or bizarre paraphrase. Based on training and imagination, the interviewer will try to name and classify those descriptions that sound familiar. But what about the many which do not? In current practice, and due to the control of ready-made glossaries, it is likely that such descriptions will be quietly ignored. This is a pity for these unnamed experiences are also markers of disease. In the past, when alienists felt freer to describe madness, patients were listened to: that was the manner in which current symptoms were born. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical analysis of the memory disorders must borrow from areas as wide apart as the history of neuropsychiatry, philosophy and psychology. Indeed, the decision of whether clinical phenomena such as dèjd vu, fugues, confabulations or ‘delusions of memory’ are mnestic disturbances cannot be determined by empirical research alone and requires preparatory conceptual analysis. Historical research may also inform us whether models of memory analogous to current ones have already been proposed in the past, and to what extent they have also been inspired on the mnestic vicissitudes of few famous patients. This chapter will only scan what remains an uncharted territory. Pre-nineteenth century issues From earlier times, man's ability to retain, retrieve, or lose information whether about himself or the world has been motive of wonder, fear and much speculation. Since the Classical period two memory ‘stages’ or ‘capacities’ have been identified: conservation and retrieval. The analysis of conservation was governed by ‘spatial’ metaphors (pertaining to storage spaces and containers) and these were easily retranslated into the current ‘somatic’ or ‘organic’ accounts. Retrieval mechanisms, on the other hand, were analysed in the temporal dimension or as Aristotle put it, they are ‘always accompanied by time’; the guiding metaphors in this case were ‘searching’ and ‘finding’ and the ensuing models alluded to functions such as cataloguing, dating, and recognizing information. Since the time of Aristotle, interest on memory has oscillated between these two perspectives. References to ‘memory’ can be found in early documents including the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Plato's work, but there is agreement that Aristotle set the framework in relation to which the philosophy of memory has been discussed ever since. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the concept of ‘delusion’ is intertwined with that of ‘insanity’ and depends upon contemporary theories of thinking and belief. On the continent, and up to the 1850s, délire and Wahn referred to either madness or delusion (the French term also named ‘organic delirium’). Since the sixteenth century, the English word delusion has meant ‘fixed false opinion or belief with regard to objective things’ (OED, second edition). This intellectualist definition, albeit narrower, is easier to explore than its continental counterparts. Delusions before the nineteenth century Continental views A good place to start is the French Encyclopédic where délire is defined as ‘an error of judgment by the spirit, during wakefulness, of things known to all.’ The author used the same word to refer to delusion and delirium and offered the same causal mechanism for both. Delusion and delirium were to be distinguished on the bases of aetiology, course, intensity, presence or absence of fever. All forms of délire were ‘organic’: ‘the soul is always in the same state and is not susceptible to change. So, the error of judgment that is délire cannot be attributed to the soul but to the disposition of the bodily organs.’ Tension and relaxation of nerves led to manic or melancholic délire, respectively; and according to the number of nervous fibres involved, délire was universal (organic delirium) or particular (delusion). Severity may range from mild to severe and was proportional to the ‘strength of internal sensations’. In délire internal sensations are stronger than external ones. In a first stage, internal sensations impinge upon consciousness but no judgment is made (i.e. the subject remains insightful); and in a third stage, emotions compound the picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are excellent accounts of the history of hallucination and illusion but few in the English language. Hallucination and illusion name reports of experiences ascribed to perception: illusion is defined as a perceptual distortion of a stimulus, and hallucination as a perceptual declaration, of varied degree of conviction, in the absence of a relevant external stimulus. The theoretical basis for this distinction was set during the nineteenth century, although it had already been noticed by earlier writers. Before the nineteenth century Experiences redolent of hallucinations and illusions are part of the common baggage of humanity. Variously named, these experiences were in earlier times culturally integrated and semantically pregnant, i.e. their content was believed to carry a message for the individual or the world. That this feature of hallucinations has been mostly lost is a consequence of their ‘medicalization’ during the eighteenth century. During this period, hallucinations were considered as independent ‘diseases’; indeed, the view that they were ‘symptoms’, i.e. fragments of behaviour common to various diseases is a nineteenth century invention. The absence of an entry for hallucination in the French Encyclopaedia suggests that, up to the 1750s, it had not yet reached the status of other ‘psychiatric’ terms. Hunter and McAlpine have none the less shown that since the sixteenth century, hallucinatory behaviours were frequently mentioned; after 1700, Hartley and Battie added a further dimension by explaining these phenomena in terms of vibratory neurophy siology. In 1770, the French Dufour suggested that ‘fallacies of the senses’ might cause delusions: ‘The false impression of the external senses, then, must necessarily create disorder and confusion in a person's conduct; because it happens most frequently, that they determine his actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mentioned in Chapter 7, idiocy and dementia - the two syndromic forms of intellectual failure - were differentiated before Esquirol, although this alienist made their separation official. The history of acquired cognitive impairment, called here dementia for short, will also throw light on the history of the concept of cognition. The current concept of dementia was constructed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process can be described as one of pruning down the heterogeneous clinical content of dementia. The process started before 1800 and culminated in the early 1900s in what I have called the ‘cognitive paradigm’, i.e. the view that dementia just consisted of an irreversible disorder of intellectual functions. Historical analysis shows that this view resulted more from ideology than clinical observation. For decades, the cognitive paradigm has prevented the adequate mapping of the non-cognitive symptoms of dementia and hindered research. Dementia before the eighteenth century Before 1700, terms such as amentia, imbecility, morosis, fatuitas, anoea, foolishness, stupidity, simplicity, cams, idiocy, dotage, and senility (but surprisingly not dementia) were used to name, in varying degree, states of cognitive and behavioural deterioration leading to psychosocial incompetence. The word dementia, which is almost as old as the oldest of those listed above (for example, it is already found in Lucretius) simply meant ‘being out of one's mind.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of mental symptoms during the nineteenth century can be explored from four complementary perspectives: descriptive psychopathology (DP), aetiological theory, pathogenesis and taxonomy. DP refers to the language of description, aetiology to underlying causes, pathogenesis to the mechanisms that disrupt brain structure and /or function which, in turn, generate symptoms, and taxonomy to the clustering rules which govern symptom grouping. DP (also called ‘psychiatric semiology’ in Continental countries) owes much to eighteenth century theory of signs; psychiatric aetiological theory and pathogenesis were moulded upon nineteenth century developments in general medicine; and taxonomy grew out of metaphors of order and classificatory principles developed during the Enlightenment. This book deals exclusively with the history of DP and enjoins historians to tackle the remainder, i.e. the history of psychiatric aetiological theory, pathogenesis and taxonomy during the nineteenth century on which, so far, near to nothing of substance has been written. The development of DP Inter alia, DP can be defined as a descriptive-cum-cognitive system designed to capture aspects of abnormal behaviour. This it does by applying words to segments of speech and action. To achieve its purpose, two components are needed: a lexicon and segments (symptoms or referents) which have to be ‘outlined’ or ‘constructed’. Since the latter are not obviously delimited or tagged, the naming function of DP often entails fracturing the behaviour presented by mentally ill patients. Furthermore, since the resulting ‘fragments’ are not equally informational, only some need to be kept. The rules for such a decision are based on nosological and aetiological theories of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birds is a comedic play by Aristophanes that tells the story of two elderly Athenians who leave home to find a comfortable place to live. They encounter Tereus, a mythical figure who has become a bird, and together they decide to found a city in the sky among the birds. The play explores themes of power, megalomania, and the desire for escape. While some critics interpret the play as a reaction to contemporary events and personalities, others see it as a fantastical exploration of utopia. Overall, "Birds" is a humorous and imaginative work that offers a dramatization of dreams come true. [Extracted from the article]

Chapter XXXIV of Book IV entitled "In Pursuit," of the book "The Beetle: A Mystery," by Richard Marsh is presented. It highlights the plea of Paul Lessingham to Augustus Champell to find out about his optical delusion in the House of Commons that plagues him for the past twenty. It explores the suspicion of Augustus that the inventor Sydney Atherton had witnessed the escape of the mysterious burglar responsible for the loss of his letters to Lindon.

An encyclopedia entry for "psychosis" is presented. This condition covers a mental expanse that reflects a disintegration of self and its connection to nonself with common features, including impaired content and coherence of thought, reduced connection to reality, hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and behavior and extremes of affect and motivation. It is more common among people with epilepsy (PWE).

A definition of the term "schizophrenia" is presented. It refers to a psychiatric disorder characterized by a number of psychotic manifestations such as delusions and hallucinations. Its etiology is thought to involve genetic and environmental factors. Florid symptoms are most commonly present in adolescence or early adulthood.

An encyclopedia entry for "Capgras' syndrome" is presented. It refers to a type of delusional misidentification syndrome and involves the belief that familiar people and objects have been replaced by imposters. In case reports on epileptic patients, this syndrome has been described as part of an interictal and postictal psychosis.