Mania. — It is a mental illness belonging to the “manic-depressive psychosis.”
In the history of psychiatry the term has had various meanings, some of which are still common in everyday language.
Already in Homeric writings mention is made of mania, and it recurs more frequently in Hippocrates (460–335 B.C.), in whom it roughly coincides with the modern concept of paranoid and paranoiac syndromes. Much later mania became synonymous with obsessional idea, and at times even with insanity, thus encompassing all or part of mental diseases. It was only in the last decades of the past century that the present meaning was established and its classification with melancholia under manic-depressive psychoses was accepted.