Under the term 'mania' are included all those forms of mental unsoundness in which there is undue excitement. It is divided into general, intellectual, and moral, and each of the two latter classes again into general and partial.
=General Mania= affects the intellect as well as the passions and emotions. Mania is usually preceded by an incubative period in which the patient's general health is affected. The duration of this period may vary from a few days to fifteen or twenty years. When the disease is established, the patient has paroxysms of violence directed against himself as well as others. He tears his clothes to pieces, either abstains from food and drink or eats voraciously, and sustains immense muscular exertion without apparent fatigue. The face becomes flushed, the eye wild and sparkling; there is pain, weight, and giddiness in the head, with restlessness.
=General Intellectual Mania=, attacking the intellect alone, is rare; but some one emotion or passion, as pride, vanity, or love of gain, may obtain ascendancy, and fill the mind with intellectual delusions.
A _delusion_ may be defined as a perversion of the judgment, a chimerical thought; an _illusion_, an incorrect impression of the senses, counterfeit appearances; hence we speak of a delusion of the mind, an illusion of the senses. Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions as indicative of insanity. An _hallucination_ is a sensation which is supposed by the patient to be produced by external impressions, although no material object acts upon his senses at the time.
=Partial Intellectual Mania=, or =Monomania=, also called =Melancholia=, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to common-sense and his own experience.
=General Moral Mania.=--This is a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect, or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucination. It is often difficult to distinguish this form of mania from the moral depravity which we associate with the criminal classes.