The question whether hallucinations always betoken some unsoundness of mind cannot be answered from a theoretical standpoint. Like the whole of psychiatry, it is a question of experience. Should experience show that hallucinations occur only among those whose minds are-disordered, then we should be right in considering them as symptoms of derangement. But it is not so. Experience shows that sane persons, especially men of lively fancy, like great artists and poets, are subject to hallucinations; and though such phenomena are exceptional, and in that sense may be called not” normal,” yet nothing could be more preposterous than to regard all those great men as subject to occasional disorders of mind, or as approaching insanity in any way.

I have shown above what an influence emotion can exert upon all the organs of the body. A permanent acceleration of the pulse is, as we know by experience, always a morbid symptom. But would it ever occur to a pathologist to pronounce a person diseased because some emotion—such as fright, anxiety, or joy—made his heart beat faster? Emotion may produce in one man beating of the heart, in another vasomotor phenomena, such as blushing or blanching, and in a third any one of manifold nervous stares, without there being anything morbid in those effects. In men of uncommonly strong fancy the emotion may sometimes call up supervenient hallucinations. But that is merely a phenomenon analogous to the beating of the heart, which we observe every day, except that it is relatively infrequent.

Hallucinations that are held to be true always make us fear for the preservation of an unclouded self-consciousness and of an unfalsified reaction between the ego and the outer world. In deciding whether, in a given case, hallucinations are to be denominated morbid, the decisive circumstance will be whether and how far the self-consciousness and free will have been influenced, and whether and how far responsibility for actions has been diminished.

Besides hallucinations, other phenomena connected with the rich fancy of famous poets and artists have many points of similarity with symptoms of insanity, and in many cases may lead to actual insanity.

—from Genius and Degeneration: a psychological study, 1896

Reading II

Behind the scenes, or, Life in an insane asylum
by Lydia Adeline Jackson Button Smith

PREFACE

The experience of Mrs. Lydia A. Button while at the insane asylum, also an interesting account of her almost miraculous escape and return home to her friends. She was taken to the asylum by the unmitigated villany of her husband and a woman, his accomplice. No greater outrage has ever been committed in any community than was practiced against this unoffending woman, as can be proven by countless numbers of people, and all the best citizens of her native place.