Connecticut western news., 1876-04-07
THE CAUSES OF INSANITY.
An Interesting Paper from the superinten
 dent of an English Asylum.

I~~ AnsoA osIAn6 H2peE rom the Supor1ntens dent of an English Asylum.
 Dr. Clouston, physician superinten-
 dent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum,
 in his annual report. says: Glancing
 over the summary of assigned causes, it
 is at once seen that intemperance stands
 out as by far the most frequent. 1t
 alone caused forty eight of the 26O, or
 about twenty per cent. of the cases. Much is properly said about the pre-
 vention of diseases nowadays. Most un-
 occasionally the sum total of the men,
 tai diseases in our city might have been
 lessened by that amount if the laws of
 nature had been better obeyed. Fifty
 of the cases thus resulting from drink
 ing and excesses being paupers, each
 costing 927 year to the public rates,
 over s1 300 will have been paid for one
 years production of lunacy from very preventible causes, and, of course, this takes no account of the cost of the old incurable cases already in the asylum from the same cause.
 am quite sure that intemperance was the remote cause of the disease in more of the cases; but, even allowing for these, we cannot put this down as &C., counting in any way for more than one in four of all cases of insanity. In as- signing intemperance as the cause of in- sanity in number of cases, two things must not be forgotten. The first is, that the taking of stimulants may not be cause at all, but merely a symptom of the brain disorder; and, as a matter of fact, it is often one of the early symp- toms in many cases. The second thing to be kept in mind is that there are many cases in which it is the real cause of the mental disorder; but the mental balance has always been SO unstable, and the brain working so easily overset, that a very little alcohol indeed will bring on an attack of insanity in the persons, just as in those same people fright or a little over-excitement will upset their sanity. This IS the class of persons who, in my experience, get upset by religious revivals.
 The resetting and recuperative power that is really an essential part of healthy nervous system, whereby the effects of not too long-continued over-eating or over-feeling or over-work are at once recovered from, is wanting ng in these people. Nature provides that short excesses don't do much harm to healthy people. It is a poor sort of boiler that bursts whenever the exact pressure needed for its daily work is exceeded. And before I leave this sub lect may mention thatI have not rock oned in any way the mere drinking cray ing or the inability to resist it, as con- stituting insanity. I believe this may or may not be real insanity in differ ant cases, but it was from developed md unmistakable mental alienation that Ill my patients suffered. When the 'auses of the insanity of our eighty ,ight private patients are compared with hose of the 222 paupers, the difference 8 most striking, and entirely bears out he general law already indicated. g |
 Of those eighty eight private patients, mental causes produced the disease in | sbout thirty eight, physical being only ;welve per cent. under them, while in he paupers they were just one-third as numerous. These facts tend strongly to how that the higher in the social scale ve go the more strongly do purely men, al and moral shocks act in upsetting a lealthy mental balance, and that those auses operate more powerfully on the over classes of town population than n agricultural.