Psychomotor retardation is an underactivity of both mind and body in which consciousness is dulled and the body sluggish.
A neurosis is a disorder of the nerves, which may be functional or organic.
Nervousness is properly termed a psychoneurosis—for we have learned that there can be no neurosis without an accompanying psychosis.
Psychosis is the technical synonym for insanity.
Borderland disorders constitute a group in which mental perversions do not yet so dominate reactions as to make them irrational.
Twilight is neither night nor day; the feelings of the hysteric are not insane, but the actions may be.
Insanity is a prolonged departure from the individual’s normal standard of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Mania is insane excitement.
Melancholia is the inability of the mind to react to any stimulus with other than gloom and depression.
Melancholia may be of the intellectual type or of the emotional type. The patient who tells you constantly that he has murdered all his children, that he is a criminal beyond the power of God to redeem, who seems chained to his delusions, yet shows no adequate feeling reaction, no genuine sorrow, we call a case of the intellectual type of melancholia. Another patient misinterprets every normal reason for happiness until it becomes a cause of settled foreboding. The mother, whose son fought safely through the war and is now returning to her, feels that his coming forecasts calamity for him. He had better have died in France. She is of the emotional type of melancholia.