Insanity (a term of pre-revolutionary legislation meaning)

INSANITY, a term of pre-revolutionary legislation meaning a congenital mental illness or one noted from early infancy, as opposed to madness, which embraces all other forms of mental disorder. The expression insanity is first encountered in 1742 in a Senate decree "on receiving into monasteries the elderly and mentally damaged prisoners sent from the Secret Chancery, for correction." In 1815, the Senate, jointly with the State Council, established precisely that division of mental patients into the insane and the mad, which subsequently entered the Code of Laws. In both cases, the criterion of mental disorder is the absence of "sound reason," the resolution of the question of which, according to Art. 373, Part 1, Vol. X of the Code of Laws, "consists in a strict review of the answers to the proposed questions relating to ordinary circumstances and domestic life." Thus, the criterion of the terms insanity and "madness" is applicable only to those forms of mental disorder that are associated solely with gross violations of formal intellectual abilities. This definition—the lack of sound reason—is based on a negative attribute. The negation of any attribute of a known condition does not always give an exact concept of the condition defined by the negation. According to Art. 95 of the Penal Code, the insane or mad are punishable for offenses committed by them only "when there is no doubt that the insane or mad person, according to his condition at that time, could not have had a notion of the illegality and of the very nature of his act." In the indicated article of the old Penal Code, which utilizes the psychological criterion of non-accountability (see Accountability), only one condition is given for the capacity for "free self-determination"—libertas judicii, i.e., a person's understanding of the meaning and properties of their actions and, among other things, the knowledge that certain actions are forbidden by law; the second and most important—libertas consilii, i.e., the possibility of making a choice between various motives of action—is not given. According to this legal provision, it was possible to consider the majority of mental patients capable of accountability, since in many forms of mental illness, even in the narrow sense of the word (e.g., paranoia, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, etc.), although mental patients understand the meaning and properties of their actions, their acts are nevertheless caused by a MENTAL illness.