It is with these patients as though not only initiative were lost but
also the power to follow another's lead. But their independence asserts
itself in opposing every suggestion and in acting so far as possible
contrary to it.

_Mutism_, as used in psychiatry, is an abnormal inhibition to speech.

Patients sometimes speak no word in many months. To all appearance they
are true mutes. Then suddenly something may remove the mental blockade
and they talk.

_Compulsive acts_ are acts contrary to reason, which the will cannot
prevent.

A seemingly quite normal patient will sometimes grab a vase from a stand
in passing, and dash it to the floor. Something "urged" him to do it,
and he could not resist. Others will tear their clothes to shreds, not
in anger, but because they "could not help it."

_Psychomotor overactivity_ is abnormal activity of both mind and body,
contrary to reason and uncontrolled by will.

_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 e