It is difficult to treat katatonia without the conveniences of a hospital.
PRIMARY CONFUSIONAL INSANITY is a term recently introduced for a form of mental disease of which the most marked features are moderate fever rapidly developed, confusion, incoherence, and mild delirium. The onset of the disease is rapid. In some of the cases which I have seen the diagnosis was made of typhoid fever, although the clinical marks of that disease were absent, the general appearance of the patient in the two diseases being quite similar.
There is no real melancholia or exaltation, no rapid flow of ideas, and no dementia. Hallucinations of the special senses are common; there is a consciousness of illness; the delusions are unsystematized, and the confusion of ideas frequently goes to the point of not being able to recognize persons and places. The usual signs of fever are present for a few days, but the temperature rarely exceeds 102° F., and soon drops to nearly or quite the normal.
The COURSE of the disease is quite rapid, and if recovery does not take place in several weeks or a few months, chronic insanity with delusions or dementia of various degrees may be expected.
The MORBID ANATOMY is not distinctive of this condition in the early stage, and we cannot yet differentiate it from simple fevers by the post-mortem. If ending in incurability, the atrophic and degenerative changes of chronic mental disease are found.
As regards removal from home, the considerations already referred to should be the guide. It is a good rule to keep the patient at home if a suitable one for the purpose, and to resort to the asylum in case of chronicity or troublesome complications.
PRIMARY DELUSIONAL INSANITY (Folie systematisée, Verrücktheit20) differs from secondary delusional insanity in the facts that the disease arises primarily, and not secondarily to other mental diseases; that there is little or no mental enfeeblement in the early stage; and that the delusions, although fixed and systematized, are limited. It has the advantage of allowing the avoidance of the misleading terms monomanie of the French and monomania of English and American writers, the narrower forms of which may be included under the term primary insanity (primäre Verrücktheit), including the further developments of the neuropathic constitution, especially those with the physical marks of degeneration described by Sander as originäre Verrücktheit, and those marked by imperative conceptions and such delusions of self-importance, suspicion, etc. as seem to some people evidence of insanity, while by others they are considered as simply false beliefs not indicating mental disease. Unlike primary insanity, which is one of the states of mental defect and degeneration, and incurable, primary delusional insanity may occur in persons of healthy mental organization, and may end in recovery,21 although it is one of the most distinctly hereditary forms of insanity, generally speaking.
20 Called also by some writers Wahnsinn, although they use the term for secondary delusional insanity also.
21 Some writers include both diseases under the term monomania, and make both incurable degenerative states, which is contrary to my experience. Clouston also has seen cures in what he calls monomania (primary delusional insanity) without the neuropathic taint.
There are several subdivisions of primary delusional insanity, according to the character of the delusions: (1) with delusions of unseen agency, suspicion, and persecution; (2) with delusions of personal exaltation; (3) with delusions transformed from sensations.