Insanity

First Published in 1978. The authors’ aim has been to write about the so-called ‘major’ mental illnesses, the conditions we know as ‘the psychoses’. Now, all psychiatric disorders are potentially serious, although in fact the great majority never reach a profound degree of pathology. The psychotic illnesses, by definition, are those which present with many of the most dramatic symptoms seen in psychiatry. Included in their manifestations may be seriously disturbed behaviour, loss of contact with reality, severe delusions and hallucinations, loss of memory and of other intellectual functions, and many others. In other words, they are the illnesses which to most people represent the concepts of ‘Madness’ or ‘Insanity’. Despite the undoubted advances in our thinking about these disorders, we still tend to cross our fingers and hope that they will not happen to us. The fear— and the stigma— of mental illness is not yet dead.