Mad

Mad (pronounced mad)

(1) Mentally disturbed; deranged; insane; demented.

(2) Enraged; greatly provoked or irritated; angry.

(3) As madman or (metaphorically) mad dog, a person abnormally furious; ferocious (and can be applied literally to animals (mad bull etc), especially dogs afflicted with rabies (a rabid dog).

(4) Extremely foolish or unwise; imprudent; irrational.

(5) Wildly excited or confused; frantic (often as “in mad haste”).

(6) Overcome by desire, eagerness, enthusiasm etc; excessively or uncontrollably fond of (usually) someone; infatuated; (often as “madly in love”).

(7) Wildly lively and merry; enjoyably hilarious.

(8) Of extremes in climatic conditions (of wind, storms, etc), furious in violence.

(9) An angry or ill-tempered period, mood, or spell.

(10) As MAD, the acronym for mutually assured destruction: a theory of nuclear warfare deterrence whereby each side in a conflict has the capacity to destroy the other in retaliation for a nuclear attack.

(11) The acronym for the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, a counterintelligence agency of the German military (essentially the successor to the old Abwehr (1920-1944)).

(12) The acronym, in admiralty administration, for the Maritime anomaly detection in Global Maritime Situational Awareness, for avoiding maritime collisions

(13) The acronym, in astronomy, for the Magnetic anomaly detector which detects variations in Earth's magnetic field.

(14) The acronym, in high-energy physics, for the Methodical Accelerator Design, a CERN scripting language used in particle acceleration.

Pre 900: From the Middle English mad (adjective) & madden (an intransitive verb, derived from the adjective), from the Old English gemǣd, past participle of gemǣdan (to make mad), akin to gemād (troubled in mind; demented, insane, foolish).  It was cognate with the Old Saxon gemēd, the Old Norse meitha (to hurt, damage) and the Old High German gimeit (foolish, silly, crazy).  In the Old English, gemǣded was the past participle of gemǣdan (to render insane).  As an adjective, the comparative is madder and the superlative maddest but the strangest adjectival form is probably the very English maddish, suggesting some state between displeased and actually mad.  The ultimate root of the Old English forms was the Germanic adjective gamaidaz (changed for the worse, abnormal), the element “maid” from the primitive Indo-European moi-, a variant of the root mei- & moi- (to change, exchange, go, move), extended with a dental suffix (-d in Germanic; -t elsewhere).  The same suffixed variant moit- appears in the Latin mūtāre (to change, exchange, give and receive in exchange), familiar in COVID-19-era English as mutate.  The Sicilian Greek (a fork by virtue of geography always most likely to be influenced by Latin) has the noun moîtos (thanks, favor, reward), presumably a borrowing from the Old Latin moitus.  Mad is an adjective, verb & adverb; madder & maddeningness are nouns, adjectives & verbs, maddest, maddish & maddening are adjectives, madly & maddeningly are adverbs and madden & maddens are verbs; the noun use of mad is non-standard.

The synonyms for mad exist in its four senses (1) lunatic, maniacal, psychotic, crazed, crazy, nuts, kooky, nutty, insane, (2) furious, exasperated, livid, raging, wrathful, irate, (3) ill-advised; unsafe, dangerous, perilous & (4) absurd, fantastic, delirious, wondrous.  There is much overlap in the synonyms, insane historically meant “not sane, mentally unstable” but is now popular with the Instagram generation as a general expression of approval and "bonkers", while still meaning “not sane, mentally unstable” also (except in the US) has come to be used in an entirely non-pejorative way to suggest something astonishing in the sense of something or someone verging on the irrational but in some way inspiring; absurd works in a similar way.

Bonkers: 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170.

Because it makes Greta Thunberg (b 2003) mad, the likes of the SRT Demon 170 won’t be seen again but an off-the-shelf machine which can generate 1,025 horsepower makes a fine swansong.  To make Ms Thunberg madder still, it’s noted the induction system is capable of providing more fuel flow per minute than the average US showerhead and in a nice touch the purchaser will receive a commemorative Demon 170 decanter set.  Thousand horsepower cars for the street have traditionally been the preserve of madmen but mad women should be encouraged to give one a try.   

The word appears often in idiomatic use including “mad as a March hare” which alluded to hares becoming especially active in spring their mating season; “mad as a meat axe”, an especially evocative piece of Australian slang which is self-explanatory to anyone who has seen an un-skilled operator use a meataxe on a carcass and “barking mad”, the origin of which is mysterious.  The best story links it with the existence of a medieval lunatic asylum in the grounds of the royal monastery Barking Abbey (located in what is now the London borough of Barking and Dagenham) but there’s no evidence of use before the early twentieth century and most etymologists have concluded there’s a link with the idea “mad dogs” incessantly bark.  The London slang use suggesting someone is “three stops past Barking” is thought to have be an opportunistic adoption referencing the “barking” and in the vein of something like “a picnic short of a sandwich” which suggests some degree of mental incapacity.  There was even “shorthand slang” based on this idea: were one to be called “daggers”, it meant one was “three stops past Barking”, Dagenham being three stations beyond Barking on the London Underground.

The original meaning of mad was “insane, demented, disturbed of mind”, a sense inherited with the word from the Germanic forms.  The progression in meaning seems to have begun circa 1300 when the senses (1) “mad dog” (dog afflicted with rabies (rabid)), (2) “foolish or unwise” and (3), “overcome by desire or eagerness” emerged; the meaning “enraged, angry” not recorded until circa 1400.  This sense of mad quickly became the usual colloquial term in the United States whereas “angry” long persisted as the popular form elsewhere in the English-speaking world although the increasing US cultural influence noted since the mid-twentieth century makes these distinctions probably less noticeable.  The sense “wildly lively, merry” is said to be an innovation of African-American English associated with jazz and dating from the 1940s.  For those learning English, “mad” must seem a strange word given the social difficulties engendered if one accidently mixes up being “mad about you” with “mad at you”.  So students should be given practical examples such as: "I am mad about him" (I would like to enjoy intimacy with him); "I am mad at him" (I am angry with him or I would like to kill him); "He is mad" (he appears mentally unstable).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

Another thing for them to learn was that wad was one of those words listed as a class-identifier by Professor Alan Ross (1907-1980), Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham who in 1954 coined "U" (upper-class) and "non-U" (non-Upper-Class) to describe the differences social class makes in their use of English.  While his article included differences in pronunciation and writing styles, it was his list of variations in vocabulary which attracted most interest.  One difference he noted was the upper-class call the obviously unstable “mad” whereas the lower classes tend to label them “mental”.  Professor Ross published his illustrative glossary "U" and "non-U", differentiating the speech patterns in English social classes, in a Finnish academic journal and used extracts from Nancy Mitford’s (1904–1973 and the oldest of the Mitford sisters, all but one of whom society's more conventional types were apt to label "mad") 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love to provide examples of the patterns of speech of the upper class.  This pleased Nancy Mitford who interpolated the professor’s work into an article about the English gentry she was writing for Stephen Spender's (1909-1995) literary magazine Encounter (1953-1990).  Although not best-pleased that her discussion of the Ross thesis was the only part of her piece to attract attention, more amusing was the subsequent re-publication in 1956 in her Noblesse Oblige: an Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy which, augmented with contributions from John Betjeman (1906–1984) and Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), meant that for decades she was the acknowledged authority on upper-class speech, manners and ways.  Her class-conscious readers had taken it all more seriously than she had intended.

Until probably sometime in the nineteenth century, for all but a few specialists, the condition of madness was relatively simple: people were mad or sane and while it was noted one could become the other, once labeled as mad one was by most, probably always thought mad and the punchy succinctness of the word could produce a memorable phrase such as the one used by Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828) to describe her lover, Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron 1788–1824): "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know".  The only widely observed nuances were behavioral and that was because madness was an observational diagnosis; there were those who were mad, slightly mad, quite mad and barking mad, hardly clinically exact descriptors but it’s doubtful many misunderstood what was being conveyed.  Modernity’s advances in neurology and pharmacology allowed the creation of psychiatry which began to gain a grudging acknowledged respectability in the medical profession around the turn of the century and it been a growth industry since.  The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), when first published (DSM-I, 1952) was a slim volume of 130 pages which listed 106 mental disorders but by the time the fifth edition (DSM-5, 2013) was released it had grown to 947 pages although interestingly, the number of specific diagnoses was reduced from 172 in DSM-IV (1987) to 157, something of an achievement given 15 new mental illnesses were added.  It is though bit of a definitional minefield and there are those who suggest that once deconstructed, there are really over 300 identifiable conditions, some of the official 157 categories better thought of as groups or clusters.  However the count is done, nobody is expecting DSM-6 to contain fewer pages, whatever method is used to define the conditions so it seems there must been more to madness than once convenient mad-sane binary.

How much the proliferation of diagnosed madness is mission-creep and how much better understanding is a debate, mostly outside the profession.  Some of it is certainly an attempt to secure market-share for the psychiatrists, some “conditions” once thought normal as part of the spectrum of the human condition now listed as a disorder to be referred for treatment and in some cases this is doubtlessly a good thing although quite how reassuring a diagnosis of “generalized anxiety disorder” (GAD) is for a patient may be questionable.  GAD may also be overkill, the psychoanalyst having long supplanted the priest for those who can afford the hourly-rate, market share seems well secured.

Some of Louis Wain's drawings of cats, all reputed to date from his time of incarceration in a mental hospital during the 1930s.

The English artist Louis Wain (1860–1939) was a noted painter of cats, sometimes naturalistic, sometimes stylized and often anthropomorphic.  In his sixties he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to a series of mental institutions, settling eventually in Napsbury Hospital, north of London.  By the standards of the time it was a convivial place with a park and a colony of cats and while his condition worsened, the frequency of his psychotic episodes decreased but drawings of cats he continued to produce became increasingly abstract, intricate and bizarre.  After 1930, he would never again leave Napsbury and there, in 1939, he died aged 78.

For a long time his paintings of cats have been used to illustrate an artist's descent into madness, a theme popular in those circles in which the notion of the "disturbed genius" is a cult.  However, the thesis has been questioned, notably on the technical ground of chronology; being undated, it can't be guaranteed the sequence of drawings as they're usually assembled are an accurate lineal progression of his work and doubt has been case even on the diagnosis of schizophrenia, some speculating the then not well understood medication used in the era to treat the condition may have contributed to his symptoms.

MADD

MADD, Madd & MaDD (pronounced mad)

(1) The acronym (as MADD) for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a non-profit education and lobbying operation founded in California in 1982 with a remit to campaign against driving while drink or drug-affected.

(2) The acronym (as MADD) for Myoadenylate deaminase deficiency or Adenosine monophosphate deaminase.

(3) The acronym (as MADD) for multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (known also as the genetic disorder Glutaric acidemia type 2).

(4) In computing (as MADD), the acronym for Multiple-Antenna Differential Decoding (a technique used in wireless comms using multiple antennas for both transmit & receive which improves performance by exploiting spatial diversity & multipath propagation of the wireless channel).

(5) As the gene MADD (or MAP kinase), an activating death domain protein.

(6) As Madd, the fruit of Saba senegalensis (a fruit-producing plant of the Apocynaceae family, native to the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa).

(7) As madd, a clipping of maddah (from the From Arabic مَدَّة (madda)), the English form of the Arabic diacritic (a distinguishing mark applied to a letter or character) used in both the Arabic & Persian.

(8) The acronym (as MaDD), Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder.

(9) The acronym (as MADD), for mutually assured digital destruction: a theory of cyber-warfare whereby each participant demonstrates to the other their capacity to inflict equal or more severe damage in retaliation, thereby deterring a cyber-attack (based on the earlier MAD (mutually assured destruction), a description of nuclear warfare deterrence).

From AD to MAD, 1962-1965

The period between the addition of nuclear weapons to the US arsenal in 1945 and 1949 when the USSR detonated their first atomic bomb was unique, a brief anomaly in the history of great-power conflict.  It's possible to find periods in history when one power has possessed an overwhelming preponderance of military strength that would have enabled them easily to defeat any enemy or possible coalition but never was the imbalance of force so asymmetric as it was between 1945-1949.   Once both the US and USSR possessed strategic nuclear arsenals, the underlying metric of Cold War became the two sides sitting in their bunkers counting warheads and the centrality of that lasted as long as the bombs were gravity devices delivered by aircraft which needed to get to a point above the target.  At this point, the military’s view was that nuclear war was possible and the only deterrent was to maintain a creditable threat of retaliation and, still in the age of the “bomber will always get through” doctrine, both sides literally kept squadrons of nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7.  Once ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and (especially) submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBMs) were deployed, the calculation of nuclear war changed from damage assessment to an acknowledgement that, in the worse case scenarios made possible by the preservation of large-scale second-strike retaliatory capacity, although the "total mutual annihilation" of the popular imagination was never likely, the damage inflicted would have been many times worse and more extensive than in any previous conflict and, although the climatarian implications weren't at the time well-understood, the consequences would have been global and lasted to one degree or another for centuries.

It was thus politically and technologically deterministic that the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD) would evolve and it was a modification of a deterrence doctrine known as AD (assured destruction) which appeared in Pentagon documents as early as 1962.  AD was intended as a way to deter the USSR from staging a first-strike against the US, the notion being that the engineering and geographical deployment of the US's retaliatory capacity was such that whatever was achieved by a Soviet attack, their territory would suffer something much worse.  To the Pentagon planners in their bunker, the internal logic of AD was compelling and was coined as a description of the prevailing situation rather than a theoretical doctrine.  To the general population, it obviously meant MAD (mutually assured destruction) and while as a doctrine of deterrence, the metrics remained the same, after 1966 when the term gained currency, it began to be used as an argument against the mere possession of nuclear arsenals, the paradox being the same acronym was also used to underpin the standard explanation of the structural reason nuclear warfare was avoided.  Just as paradoxically, while serving to prevent their use, MAD also fueled the arms race because the stalemate created its own inertia and it would be almost a decade before the cost and absurdity of maintaining the huge number of useless warheads was addressed.  MAD probably also contributed to both sides indulging in conflict by proxy, supporting wars and political movements which served as surrogate battles made too dangerous by the implications of MAD to be contested between the two big protagonists.

Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder

There are those who criticize the existence of MADD (Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder) as an example of the trend to “medicalize” aspects of human behaviour which have for millennia been regarded as “normal”, the implication being the sudden creation of a cohort of customers for psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry, the suspicion being MADD is of such interest to the medical-industrial complex because the catchment is of the “worried well”, those with sufficient disposable income to make the condition worthwhile, the poor too busy working to ensure food and shelter for their families for there to be much time to daydream.

Still, the consequences of MADD are known to be real and while daydreaming is a common and untroubling experience for many, in cases where it’s intrusive and frequent, it can cause real problems with everyday activities such as study or employment as well as being genuinely dangerous if associated with tasks such as driving or the use of heavy machinery.  The condition was first defined by Professor Eli Somer (b 1951; a former President of both the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD)) who described one manifestation as possibly an “escape or coping mechanism from trauma or abuse”, noting it may “involve long periods of structured fantasy”.  Specific research into MADD has been limited but small-scale studies have found some similarities to behavioral addictions, the commonality being a compulsion to engage in activities despite negative impacts on a person’s mental or physical health or ability to function various aspects of life. 

Despite the suggestion of similarities to diagnosable conditions, latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR, 2022) did not add an entry for MADD and the debate among those in the profession interested in the matter is between those arguing it represents an unidentified clinical syndrome which demands a specific diagnosis and those who think either it fits within the rubric of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or is a dissociative condition.  Accordingly, in the absence of formal recognition of MADD, while a psychiatrist may decline to acknowledge the condition as a specific syndrome, some may assess the described symptoms and choose to prescribe the drugs used to treat anxiety or OCD or refer the patient to sessions of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or the mysterious mindfulness meditation.

Mutually Assured Digital Destruction

Authors in 2021 suggested MADD (mutually assured digital destruction) as the term to describe the strategic stalemate achieved by the major powers infecting each other’s critical (civilian & military) digital infrastructure with crippleware, logic-bombs and other latent tools of control or destruction.  The core the idea was based on old notion of “the bomber always gets through”, a recognition it’s neither possible to protect these systems from infiltration nor clean up what’s likely there and still undiscovered.  So, rather than being entirely covert, MADD instead makes clear to the other side its systems are also infected and there will be retaliation in kind to any cyber attack with consequences perhaps even worse than any suffered in the first strike.  Like the nuclear submarines with their multiple SLBMs silently which cruise the world's oceans, the strategic charm of the latent penetration of digital environments is that detection of all such devices is currently impossible; one knows they (and their SLMBs) are somewhere in firing range but not exactly where.  Oceans are big places but so is analogously is the digital environment and a threat may be in the hardware, software or the mysterious middleware and sometimes a treat can actually be observed yet not understood as such.

For individuals, groups and corporations, there's also the lure of unilateral destruction, something quite common in the social media age.  For a variety of reasons, an individual may choose to "delete" their history of postings and while it's true this means what once was viewable no longer is, it does not mean one's thoughts and images are "forever gone" in the sense one can use the phrase as one watches one's diary burn.  That was possible (with the right techniques or a power drill) when a PC sat on one's desk and was connected to nothing beyond but as soon as a connection with a network (most obviously the internet) is made and data is transferred, whatever is sent is in some sense "in the wild".  That was always true but in the modern age it's now effectively impossible to know where one's data may exist, such are the number of "pass-through" devices which may exist between sender and receiver.  On the internet, even if the path of the data packets can be traced and each device identified, there is no way to know where things have been copied (backup tapes, replica servers et al) and that's even before one wonders what copies one's followers have taken.  There may often be good reasons to curate one's social media presence to the point of deletion but that shouldn't be thought of as destruction.

Alienist

Alienist (pronounced eyl-yuh-nist or ey-lee-uh-nist)

(1) A medical practitioner specializing in the treatment of mental illness (archaic).

(2) In law, an expert witness who specializes in the legal aspects of mental illness and mental competence (now less common).

1864: From the French aliéniste, from aliéné (insane), the construct being alien(ation) + -ist.  Alien was from the Middle English alien, from the Old French alien & aliene, from the Latin aliēnus (belonging to someone else (the sense of that which was “exotic; foreign” came later), from alienare (deprive of reason, drive mad (literally “to make another's, estrange”)) from alius (other), from the primitive Indo-European hélyos (from which English ultimately gained “else”).  The -ist suffix was from the Middle English -ist & -iste, from the Old French -iste and the Latin -ista, from the Ancient Greek -ιστής (-istḗs), from -ίζω (-ízō) (the -ize & -ise verbal suffix) and -τής (-tḗs) (the agent-noun suffix).  It was added to nouns to denote various senses of association such as (1) a person who studies or practices a particular discipline, (2), one who uses a device of some kind, (3) one who engages in a particular type of activity, (4) one who suffers from a specific condition or syndrome, (5) one who subscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination, (6) one who has a certain ideology or set of beliefs, (7) one who owns or manages something and (8), a person who holds very particular views (often applied to those thought most offensive).  Alienist is a noun; the noun plural is alienists.

In English, the noun alienist was in 1864 adopted from the French to describe “one who scientifically treats or studies mental illness”.  The French aliéniste was a use of “alienation” in the sense of “insanity, loss of mental faculty”, a development in the use which from the fifteenth century had been used to mean “loss or derangement of mental faculties, insanity”, the notion drawn from the Latin alienare (deprive of reason, drive mad).  The use in English sounds strange to modern ears but was probably an improvement on the earlier “mad doctor” (ie a physician dealing with the mad although doubtless there were a few doctors who were madmen), noted since the early eighteenth century.  Although psychiatry really didn’t come to be accepted as part of mainstream medicine until the late nineteenth century, there had since antiquity been those (not always physicians) in many cultures who specialized in the care of those thought mad although institutionalized professionalism (as opposed to their employment in institutions known often as “lunatic asylums”) waited centuries to be formalized.

The word psychiatry dates from 1808 and was coined by Prussian physician Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813) as the German Psychiatrie (literally “medical treatment of the soul”, the construct being the Ancient Greek psykhē (soul) + -iatry (medical treatment) from the Greek iātrikos (medical) from iāsthai (to heal).  From this evolved the idea of physician specializing in psychiatry being a psychiatrist.  Dr Reil’s word caught on but wasn’t wholly without linguistic competition, psychiater (expert in mental diseases) in the literature since at least 1852.  Although Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) seems assumed by some almost to have “invented” psychiatry, his work in the late nineteen century was but one thread in a discipline both well established (if not wholly accepted by the medical establishment) and becoming increasingly used as the first generation of drug treatments became available.  What Freud did however in his systemised method of treatment (psychoanalysis) was define in the popular imagination just what a psychiatrist was.  The profession however had been around for a while and it was in 1841 the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane was founded; receiving a royal charter in 1926, it became the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Patient and alienist: Lindsay Lohan on Sigmund Freud’s couch.

In English, the word alienation had a varied history.  It began in the late fourteenth century in the law of real property (ie real estate) with the sense of “transfer of ownership, action of estranging”, from the Old French alienacion and directly from the Latin alienationem (nominative alienatio) (a transfer, surrender, separation), the noun of action from the past-participle stem of alienare (to make another's, part with; estrange, set at variance), from alienus (of or belonging to another person or place), from alius (another, other, different), from the primitive Indo-European root al- (beyond).  Early in the fifteenth century, the word was borrowed from the notaries and land conveyancers to mean “deprivation of mental faculties, insanity”, this time from a secondary sense of the Latin alienare (deprive of reason, drive mad) and for decades the word seems to appear as frequently in court records as medical journals, decisions on matters of madness very often the province of the magistracy.  A nice blending of the original idea in land ownership with the divorce courts saw “alienation of affection” (falling in love with another) adopted in the US as legal jargon in 1861.  In politics, the theorist most famously associated with alienation was Karl Marx (1818-1883) who in Das Kapital’s (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867-1894) three (very long) volumes explored, inter alia, the idea of the worker being alienated from the fruits of his labor by the employer extracting from the process the surplus value.  That has turned out to be an ongoing process.

In law, although terms like forensic psychiatrist are now preferred, an Alienist was a mental health professional who evaluated individuals in some way involved with a case before a court.  The most publicized of the alienists were those who appeared in notorious criminal trials where typically they were called upon to determine a defendant’s (and less commonly a victim’s or witness’s) state of mind at time of the alleged offense or since and thus their competency to stand trial, be cross-examined or give evidence.  Alienists almost always had a background in psychiatry or psychology and, in recent decades, also specialised training in the techniques of forensic evaluation.  Depending on the jurisdiction, alienists were sometimes asked to comment on recommendations for treatment and offer opinions on issues such as the potential for reform or likelihood of recidivism.

The idea of medical experts offering opinions on mental health matters is now so unexceptional as not usually to attract comment but in the nineteenth century when the first alienists began to be called as expert witnesses, it was novel.  Then, psychology (the clinical study of mental pathologies) was not only embryonic but subject to much criticism by doctors who insisted that diagnosis without empirical evidence was an absurdity and echos of the attitude persist in the views some have of the very existence of conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)).  Then, the mentally ill tended to be confined rather than treated and the psychology of the nineteenth century alienists was very much a laboratory discipline, the clinical or behavioral work today familiar as an orthodoxy mostly still decades away.  Instead, alienists analysed aspects of learning, perception and memory and their craft would now be understood as a kind of study of cognition.  As a profession, the alienists really advanced their discipline in the first three quarters of the twentieth century as understanding improved of the influence of the unconscious mind on individual actions.  Additionally, the consequences of the two world wars provided vast numbers of the mentally damaged to study and in the 1950s and 1960s, it came to be appreciated just how significant could be contextually such as poverty and racism.  All this happened while there were enormous advances in neurology and the physical brain itself came better to be understood, the idea of neuropsychological research coming to be accepted as a valid scientific method to explain the behaviour of individuals.  So much has changed including the nomenclature, the term alienist now rarely used in courts and if asked, most folk would likely assume an alienist is "one who studies aliens".

Hatter

Hatter (pronounced hat-er)

(1) A maker or seller of hats.

(2) In Australian slang (1) a person who has become eccentric from living alone in a remote area or (2) a person who lives alone in the bush, as a herder or prospector (now archaic and dating from the 1850s, a synecdoche of “mad as a hatter”).

(3) A student or member of the athletic program at Stetson University in Florida.

(4) In dialectical South Scots, to bother; to get someone worked up (and thus related to the modern “to hassle”).

1350–1400: From the Middle English hatter, the construct being hat + -er.  Hat was from the Middle English hat (head covering), from the Old English hæt (head-covering, hat), from the Proto-Germanic hattuz (hat), from the primitive Indo-European kadh (to guard, cover, care for, protect).  It was cognate with the North Frisian hat (hat), the Danish hat (hat), the Swedish hatt (hat), the Icelandic hattur (hat), the Latin cassis (helmet), the Lithuanian kudas (bird's crest or tuft), the Avestan xaoda (hat), the Persian خود‎ (xud) (helmet) and the Welsh cadw (to provide for, ensure).  The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  The –er suffix was added to verbs to create a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun.  If added to a noun it usually denoted an occupation.  Hatter is a noun and the rare hattering & hattered are verbs; the noun plural is hatters.

Lindsay Lohan wearing hats.

The synonyms are hatmaker (or hat-maker) & milliner.  As makers of hats, the difference between a hatter and a milliner is that a milliner is a hat-maker specializing (historically bespoke headpieces) in women's headwear (and works at a millinery shop), while a hatter makes hats for men (and works at a hattery).  In the business of selling hats the distinction blurred, especially in the case of operations which dealt with hats for both men and women.  As a retailer, a hatter could deal either exclusively in hats for men for those for both sexes whereas what was sold by a millinery was (at least intended) only for women.  Milliner was from the Middle English Milener (native of Milan), the construct an irregular form of Milan + -er, the link explained by the northern Italian city being the source of many of the fine garments for women imported into England in the late Medieval age.

Depiction of the mad hatter’s tea party.  Created by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), The Hatter appears in both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and though nowhere in the text does the author make reference to a "mad hatter", that is the popular form and not an unreasonable one, given the madness of both The Hatter and the March Hare is confirmed by the Cheshire Cat.  Lewis Carroll was said to be familiar with the traits of madness and the condition suffered by hatters was well known but some literary historians have speculated The Hatter may have been based on an eccentric shop-keeper.  There’s no documentary evidence to support the claim.

Role model JR Ewing (Larry Hagman, 1931–2012) in Stetson hat.

The use of Hatter (usually in the collective Hatters) to describe students or members of the athletic program at Florida’s Stetson University comes from John B Stetson (1830-1906), otherwise famous as the hatter known for his eponymous hats.  The school was in 1883 founded as the DeLand Academy but was in 1889 renamed Stetson after the Mr Hatter joined the Board of Trustees, the change acknowledging his financial largess.  Thus were born the Hatters and the name (informally) extends to the school’s mascot (who is correctly named John B) which wears a Stetson hat, green bandana, and alligator skin boots.  The mascot is considered equal in status to all other members of the school family.

Lindsay Lohan wearing more hats.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” was first recorded in 1829 and is usually attributed to the correlation noted between those engaged in the profession of hat-making and instances of Korsakoff's syndrome induced by the frequency of them handling mercury-contaminated felt.  The nineteenth century speculation of a link with the Old English ātor (poison) or its descendant the Middle English atter (poison, venom,) lacks evidence has long been discredited.  Korsakoff's syndrome was named after the Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff (1854-1900 (his work on alcoholic psychosis still influential)) who identified the syndrome which is induced by both exposure to mercury and chronic alcohol use.  A neurological disorder of the central nervous system caused by a deficiency of thiamine, the symptoms include amnesia, deficits in explicit memory, tremors and general confabulation.  The fourteenth century variant “mad as a March hare” alludes to the crazy behavior of hares during rutting season, mistakenly thought to be only in March.

In 1888, a hydrochloride-based process which obviated the need to use mercury when processing felt was patented and in France and the UK, just before the turn of the century, laws were passed banning the use of substance in the making of hats but, as an illustration of the way things have changed, in the US, the risk was ignored by hatters and their employers alike, even trade unions making no attempt to end its use.  Only with the onset of World War II when all available mercury was needed for military production did US hat makers voluntarily agree to adopt the long available alternative process which used hydrogen peroxide.

Mania

Mania (pronounced mey-nee-uh or meyn-yuh)

(1) Excessive excitement or enthusiasm; craze; excessive or unreasonable desire; insane passion affecting one or many people; fanaticism.

(2) In psychiatry, the condition manic disorder; a combining form of mania (megalomania); extended to mean “enthusiasm, often of an extreme and transient nature,” for that specified by the initial element; characterized by great excitement and occasionally violent behavior; violent derangement of mind; madness; insanity.

(3) In mythology, the consort of Mantus, Etruscan god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.  Perhaps identified with the tenebrous Mater Larum, she should not be confused with the Greek Maniae, goddess of the dead; In Greek mythology Mania was the personification of insanity.

(4) In popular use, any behavior, practice, cultural phenomenon, product etc enjoying a sudden popularity.

1350–1400: From the Middle English mania (madness), from the Latin mania (insanity, madness), from the Ancient Greek μανία (manía) (madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired frenzy; mad passion, fury), from μαίνομαι (maínomai) (I am mad) +‎ -ῐ́ᾱ (-íā).  The –ia suffix was from the Latin -ia and the Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia), which form abstract nouns of feminine gender.  It was used when names of countries, diseases, species etc and occasionally collections of stuff.  The Ancient Greek mainesthai (to rage, go mad), mantis (seer) and menos (passion, spirit), were all of uncertain origin but probably related to the primitive Indo-European mnyo-, a suffixed form of the root men- (to think)," with derivatives referring to qualities and states of maenad (mind) or thought.

The suffix –mania was from the Latin mania, from the Ancient Greek μανία (mania) (madness).  In modern use in psychiatry it is used to describe a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/or energy levels and as a suffix appended as required.  In general use, under the influence of the historic meaning (violent derangement of mind; madness; insanity), it’s applied to describe any “excessive or unreasonable desire; a passion or fanaticism” which can us used even of unthreatening behaviors such as “a mania for flower arranging, crochet etc”.  As a suffix, it’s often appended with the interfix -o- make pronunciation more natural.  The sense of a "fad, craze, enthusiasm resembling mania, eager or uncontrollable desire" dates from the 1680s, the use in English in this sense borrowed from the French manie.  In Middle English, mania had sometimes been nativized as manye. The familiar modern use as the second element in compounds expressing particular types of madness emerged in the 1500s (bibliomania 1734, nymphomania, 1775; kleptomania, 1830; narcomania 1887, megalomania, 1890), the origin of this being Medical Latin, in imitation of the Greek, which had a few such compounds (although, despite the common perception, most were actually post-classical: gynaikomania (women), hippomania (horses) etc).

The adjective maniac was from circa 1600 in the sense of "affected with mania, raving with madness" and was from the fourteenth century French maniaque, from the Late Latin maniacus, from the Ancient Greek maniakos, the Adoption in English another borrowing from French use; from 1727 it came also to mean "pertaining to mania." The noun, "one who is affected with mania, a madman" was noted from 1763, derived from the adjective.  The adjective manic (pertaining to or affected with mania), dates from 1902, the same year the clinical term “manic depressive” appeared in the literature although, perhaps strangely, the condition “manic depression” wasn’t describe until the following year although the symptoms had as early as 1857 been noted as defined as “circular insanity”, from the from French folie circulaire (1854).  It’s now known as bi-polar disorder.  The constructions hypermania & submania are both from the mid-twentieth century.  The adjective maniacal was from the 1670s, firstly in the sense of "affected with mania" and by 1701 "pertaining to or characteristic of a maniac; the form maniacally emerged during the same era.  Mania is quite specific but craving, craze, craziness, enthusiasm, fad, fascination, frenzy, infatuation, lunacy, obsession, passion, rage, aberration, bee, bug, compulsion, delirium, derangement, desire & disorder peacefully co-exist.

Noted manias

Anglomania: An excessive or undue enthusiasm for England and all things English; rarely noted in the Quai D'Orsay.

Anthomania: An extravagant passion for flowers; although it really can’t be proved, the most extreme of these are probably the orchid fanciers.  Those with an extravagant passion for weed are a different sub-set of humanity and are really narcomanics (qv) although there may be some overlap. 

Apimania: A passionate obsession with bees; beekeepers tend to be devoted to their little creatures so among the manias, this one may more than most be a spectrum condition.

Arithmomania: A compulsive desire to count objects and make calculations; noted since 1884, it’s now usually regarded as being within the rubric of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Bibliomania: A rage for collecting rare or unusual books.  This has led to crime and there have been famous cases.

Cacodaemomania: The obsessive fixation on the idea that one is inhabited by evil spirits.  To the point where it becomes troublesome it’s apparently rare but there are dramatic cases in the literature, one of the most notorious being Anneliese Michel (1952–1976) who was subject to the rites of exorcism by Roman Catholic priests in the months before she died.  The priests and her parents (who after conventional medical interventions failed, also become convinced the cause of her problems was demonic possession) were convicted of various offences related to her death.  Films based on the events leading up to death have been released including The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), Requiem (2006) and Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (2011).

Callomania: The obsessive belief in one’s own beauty, even when to all others this is obviously delusional.

Dipsomania: The morbid craving for alcohol; in pre-modern medicine, it was used also to describe the “temporary madness caused by excessive drinking”, the origin of this being Italian (1829) and German (1830) medical literature.

Egomania: An obsessive self-centeredness; it was known since 1825 but use didn’t spike until Freud (and others) made it widely discussed after the 1890s and few terms from the early days of psycho-analysis are better remembered.

Erotomania: Desperate love, a sentimentalism producing morbid feelings.

Flagellomania: An obsessive interest in flogging and/or being flogged, often as one’s single form of sexual expression and thus a manifestation of monomania (qv).  The English Liberal Party politician Robert Bernays (1902-1945), the son of a Church of England vicar, was a flagellomanic whose proclivities were, in the manner of English society at the time, both much discussed and kept secret.  He was also an illustration of the way such fetishes transcend other sexual categories.

Gallomania: An excessive or undue enthusiasm for France and all things French; rarely noted in the British Foreign Office.

Graphomania: A morbid desire to write.  Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527; Italian diplomat, philosopher and political advisor of the Renaissance) attributed many of the problems he suffered to his graphomania and he was right, his sufferings because of what he wrote, when it was written and about whom.

Hippomania: An excessive fondness for horses; an affliction which often manifests as the intense and passionate interest in horses developed by some girls who join pony clubs and fall in love.

Hypermania: There’s a definitional dualism to hypermania; it can mean either an extreme example of any mania or, as used by clinicians, specifically (and characterized usually by a mental state with high intensity disorientation and often violent behavior), a severe case of bipolar disorder (the old manic-depression).  The earlier term was hypomania (A manic elation accompanied by quickened perception), one of the earliest (1882) clinical terms from early-modern psychiatry.

Kleptomania: The obsessive desire to steal; in early (1830s) use, the alternative form was cleptomania.  The klepto element was from the Ancient Greek kleptes (thief, a cheater), from kleptein (to steal, act secretly), from the primitive Indo-European klep- (to steal), from the root kel- (to cover, conceal, save) and was cognate with the Latin clepere (to steal, listen secretly to), the Old Prussian au-klipts (hidden), the Old Church Slavonic poklopu (cover, wrapping) and the Gothic hlifan (to steal) & hliftus (thief).  The history of the word kleptomania is of interest also to sociologists in that as early as the mid-nineteenth century, there was controversy about the use by those with the capacity to buy the services of doctors and lawyers were able to minimize or escape the consequences of criminal misbehavior by claiming a psychological motive.  The argument was that the “respectable” classes were afforded the benefit of this defense while the working class were presumed to be inherently criminal and judged accordingly.  The same debate, now also along racial divides, continues today.

Lindsaymania: A specific instance of mania suffered by those obsessed with Lindsay Lohan, manifested often on Instagram and other social media platforms, including deluded souls who curate blogs with substantial Lohanic content.  They are sometimes referred to as "Lindsaiacs".

Logomania: An obsession with words.  It differs from graphomania (qv) which is an obsession to write; logomania instead is a fascination with words, their meanings and etymologies.

Megalomania: Delusions of greatness; a form of insanity in which the subjects imagine themselves to be great, exalted, or powerful personages.  It was first used in the medical literature in 1866 (from the French mégalomanie) and came to be widely applied to many politicians and potentates the twentieth century.

Micromania:  "A form of mania in which the patient thinks himself, or some part of himself, to be reduced in size", noted first in 1879 and twenty years later used also in reference to insane self-belittling.  In the twentieth century and beyond, micromania was widely used, sometimes humorously, to refer to things as varied as the sudden consumer in interest in small cars to the shrinking size of electronic components.   

Monomania: An insane obsession in regard to a single subject or class of subjects; applied most often in academic, scientific or political matters but can be used about anything where the overriding mental impulses are perverted to a specific delusion or the pursuit of a particular thing.

Morphinomania: A craving for morphine; one of the earliest of the words which noted specific addictions, it dates from 1885 but earlier still there had been morphiomania (1876) and morphinism (1875) from the German Morphiumsucht.  In the medical literature, morphinomaniac & morphiomaniac rapidly became common.

Narcomania: The uncontrollable craving for narcotic drugs and a term which is so nineteenth century, the preferred modern form being variations of "addiction".

Necromania: An obsession to have sexual relations with the bodies of the dead although, perhaps surprisingly, practitioners (those who treat rather than practice the condition) classify many different behaviors which they list under the rubric of necromania, some of the less confronting being a morbid interest in funeral rituals,  morgues, autopsies, and cemeteries.   Those whose hobbies include the study of the architecture of crypts and tombs or the coachwork of funeral hearses might be shocked to find there are psychiatrists who classify them in the same chapters as those who enjoy intimacy with corpses.

Nymphomania: The morbid and uncontrollable sexual desire in women.  Perhaps the most celebrated (and often sought) of the manias, it dates from 1775, in the English translation of Nymphomania, or a Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus (1771) by French doctor Jean Baptiste Louis de Thesacq de Bienville (1726-1813), the construct being the Ancient Greek nymphē (bride, young wife; young lady) + mania.  The actual condition is presumed to have long pre-dated the term.

Onomatomania: One obsessively compelled to respond with a rhyming word to the last word spoken by another (something possible even with orange and silver).  It’s thought to co-exist with other conditions, especially schizophrenia.

Phonomania: An uncontrollable urge to murder; those who suffer this now usually described as the more accessible “homicidal maniac”.  When applied especially to serial killers, the companion condition (just further along the spectrum) is androphonomania which, if properly argued, could be a defense against a charge of mass-murder but counsel would need to be most assiduous in jury selection.

Plutomania: The obsessive pursuit of wealth (and used sometimes in a clinical setting to describe an "imaginary possession of wealth").

Pyromania: A form of insanity marked by a mania for destroying things by fire.  It was used in German in the 1830s and seemed to have captured the imagination of Richard Wagner (1813–1883); the older word for the condition was incendiarism.

Rhinotillexomania: Nose picking. Gross, but a thing which apparently often manifests when young but fades, usually of its own volition or in reaction to the disapprobation of others.

Trichotillomania: The compulsion to pull-out one’s hair.  The companion condition is trichtillophagia which is the compulsive eating of one’s own hair, one of a remarkable number of eating disorders.

Definitional variations in the criteria for mania, DSM-IV & DSM-5

The study and classification of idea of manias had been part of psychiatry almost from its origin as a modern discipline although the wealth of details and fragmentation of nomenclature would come later, the condition first noted “increased busyness”, the manic episodes characterized by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926; a founding father of psychiatric phenomenology) as those of someone who was “…a stranger to fatigue, his activity goes on day and night; work becomes very easy to him; ideas flow to him.” 

Whatever the advances (and otherwise) in treatment regimes, little has changed in some aspects of the condition.  In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5, 2013), the primary criterion of mania remains “a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood” and “abnormally and persistently increased goal-directed activity or energy” but did extend duration of the event to qualify for a diagnosis.  In the DSM-IV (1994), the criterion for a manic episode only required “a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood, lasting at least one week” whereas DSM-5 now requires in addition the presence of “abnormally and persistently increased goal-directed activity or energy”; moreover, these symptoms must not only last at least one week, they must also be “present most of the day, nearly every day.”

The changes certainly affected the practice of the clinician, DSM-5 substantially increasing the complexity associated with the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder, no longer requiring that clinically significant symptoms which may be present should be ignored.  All those years ago, Kraepelin conceptualized manic-depression as a single illness with a continuum of episodic presentations including admixtures of symptoms which have long since been considered opposing polarity.  DSM-5 thus represents an advance with the possibility of improved treatment outcomes because it enables clinicians to diagnose mood episodes and specify the presence of symptoms inconsistent with pure episodes; a major depressive episode with or without mixed features and manic/hypomanic episodes with or without mixed features.

The revisions in DSM-5 also reflect the efforts of the editors over several decades to simplify diagnostic criteria while developing more precise categories of classification.  In the DSM-IV, both bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder were included in one chapter of mood disorders and a “mixed state” was a subtype of bipolar I mania, a diagnosis of a mixed state requiring that criteria for both a manic episode (at least three or four of seven manic symptoms) and a depressive episode (at least five of nine depressive symptoms) were met for at least one week.  In DSM-5, bipolar disorder and depressive disorders have their own chapters, and “mixed state” was removed and replaced with “manic episode with mixed features” and “major depressive disorder with mixed features.”