Ogden Daily Standard | 1916-08-31 | Page 3 | Temporary Insanity a Mental Disease

Temporary Insanity a Mental Disease Ts there such a thing as temporary insanity? Many people think that the expression expres-sion merely covers the kindly intention inten-tion of a jury to save relatives pain, but numbers of doctors who have made a study of mental disorders emphatically em-phatically declare It is no idle term. One doctor has stated that tempor. ary insanity is a condition of double consciousness, not dissimilar (o epilepsy. epil-epsy. A person normally quite sane may have attacks of temporary aberration aber-ration lasting little more than a few minutes, especially after long bouts of hard, continuous mental work, being particularly liable if insomnia' supervenes. super-venes. Crimes have been committed in the early morning, when the perpetrator has not really been properly awake and has been horrified to find what he has done. This is? a true case of temporary insanity, but it is comparatively compar-atively rare, and a man in normal health would not suffer in this way. A specialist in mental disease has stated that he knew a case in which a person was insane during a certain time each day, and that others have been known when the patient was quite normal at ordinary times, but suffered from a temporary fit of mania ma-nia regularly once a month.