MANIA. — This is a mental illness belonging to “manic-depressive psychosis.”
In the history of psychiatry, the term has had various meanings, some of which are still common in everyday language.
The m. is already mentioned in Homeric writings, and it occurs more frequently in Hippocrates (460–335 B.C.), in whom it corresponds more or less to the modern concept of paranoid and paranoiac syndromes. Much later, m. became synonymous with an obsessive idea, and at other times even with madness, thus encompassing all or part of mental illnesses. It was in the last decades of the preceding century that its present meaning became established, together with its classification alongside melancholia within manic-depressive psychoses.