The History of Personality Disorders, Essays (university) of Psychology

Download The History of Personality Disorders and more Essays (university) Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! The History of Personality Disorders Subject: Psychology Paper 3 Well into the eighteenth century, the sole sorts of mental disease - then collectively referred to as "delirium" or "mania" - were depression (melancholy), psychoses, and delusions. At the start of the nineteenth century, the French psychiatrist Pinel coined the phrase "manie sans delire" (insanity without delusions). He described patients who lacked impulse control, often raged when frustrated, and were susceptible to outbursts of violence. He noted that such patients weren't subject to delusions. He was referring, of course, to psychopaths (subjects with the Antisocial Personality Disorder). Across the ocean, within the us, Rush made similar observations. In 1835, British J. C. Pritchard, working as senior Physician at the Bristol Infirmary (hospital), published a seminal work titled "Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders of the Mind". He, in turn, suggested the neologism "moral insanity". To quote him, moral insanity consisted of "a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses with none remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect or knowing or reasoning faculties and especially with none insane delusion or hallucination" (p. 6). He then proceeded to elucidate the psychopathic (antisocial) personality in great detail: "(A) propensity to theft is usually a feature of ethical insanity and sometimes it's its leading if not sole characteristic." (p. 27). "(E)eccentricity of conduct, singular and absurd habits, a propensity to perform the common actions of life during a different way from that sometimes practised, may be a feature of the many cases of ethical insanity but can hardly be said to contribute sufficient evidence of its existence." (p. 23). "When however such phenomena are observed in reference to a wayward and intractable temper with a decay of social affections, an aversion to the closest relatives and friends formerly beloved - briefly , with a change within the moral character of the individual, the case becomes tolerably well marked." (p. 23) But the distinctions between personality, affective, and mood disorders were still murky. Pritchard muddied it further: "(A) considerable proportion among the foremost striking instances of ethical insanity are those during which a bent to gloom or sorrow is that the predominant feature ... (A) state of gloom or melancholy depression occasionally gives way ... to the other condition of preternatural excitement." (pp. 18-19) Another half century were to pass before a system of classification emerged that offered differential diagnoses of mental disease without delusions (later referred to as personality disorders), affective disorders, schizophrenia, and depressive illnesses. Still, the term "moral insanity" was being widely used. Henry Maudsley applied it in 1885 to a patient whom he described as: "(Having) no capacity for true moral feeling - all his impulses and desires, to which he yields without check, are egoistic, his conduct appears to be governed by immoral motives, which are cherished and obeyed with none evident desire to resist them." ("Responsibility in Mental Illness", p. 171).