Vesania

VESANIA (from Latin vesania—madness, insanity), mental derangement, a term used by the German psychiatrist Kahlbaum and, among Russians, by Korsakov. The latter, in classifying the main forms of psychoses, distinguished, alongside their pure types (mania, melancholia, amnesia and paranoia), also mixed forms—maniacal, melancholic and catatonic vesania, as well as premature dementia. The first two types of V. he distinguished from the pure forms by the fact that, in addition to elements of excitement and depression, he found in them an admixture of features of delirium and confusion (i.e., paranoid and amnestic); while the third was identical with Kahlbaum's catatonia (see). It was assumed that whereas pure forms arise predominantly on the basis of a healthy brain, vesania develop on a degenerative basis or in individuals with an already aging organism. Therefore, the prognosis in them was considered uncertain: according to Korsakov's opinion, only some cases of vesania ended in complete recovery, others led to incomplete recovery, and many cases passed into a state of secondary dementia. The concept of V. is characteristic of that period in the history of psychiatry when the purely symptomatic direction prevailed and diagnoses were made exclusively on the basis of a psychological classification of the pictures of conditions observed in patients. At present, this term is no longer used, and cases that were previously classified as V. are diagnosed either as various types of schizophrenia or as atypical (mixed, delirious, etc.) phases of manic-depressive psychosis.