Insanity

Of course, not all psychological troubles signify mental disorder. Mental health professionals often provide helpful guidance to people whose distress arises from difficulties in everday life. People seek counseling for relationship problems, difficulties at work or loneliness.

Normal emotional distress arising from ordinaty difficulties of living, such as anxiety about losing one's job in an economic downturn, does not signify mental disorder. Likewise, behavioral problems that conflict with social norms, such as criminal activity, do not indicate mental disorder. Although some criminals are mentally ill, committing crimes is insufficient to justify a diagnosis of mental illness. Very few murderers are insane. People can be bad without being mad.

Insanity is, in fact, disorder of brain producing disorder of mind; or, to define its nature in greater detail, it is a disorder of the supreme nerve-centres of the brain - the special organs of mind - producing derangement of thought, feeling, and action, together or separately, of such degree or kind as to incapacitate the individual for the relations of life. Mind may be defined physiologically as a general term denoting the sum-total of those functions of the brain which are known as thought, feeling, and will. By disorder of the mind is meant disorder of those functions.