mania

mania 1 *insanity, lunacy, psychosis, dementia

Analogous words: alienation, derangement, *aberration

Antonyms: lucidity

2 Mania, delirium, frenzy, hysteria are comparable when they mean a state of mind in which there is loss of control over emotional, nervous, or mental processes.

Mania (see also INSANITY) definitely implies madness or insanity; the term may designate a type of madness in which the patient manifests extreme excitability or, more precisely, the phase of manic-depressive insanity in which the patient loses control over his powers of thought, of speech, and of movement through violent excitement or excessive emotion

{

[George III] suffered a third attack of mania— William Hunt

}

Delirium implies extreme mental disturbance that may be associated with or induced by toxic factors (as of disease or drugs) or occur episodically in a prolonged mental disorder and that is characterized by raving, hallucinations, delusions, and extreme restlessness

{

a raging fever accompanied with delirium— Dickens

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{

by pain reduced to a state approaching delirium

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But delirium also, in nontechnical use, applies to a state of intense emotional excitement that manifests itself in an individual or in a group and robs him or them of self-control

{

in a delirium of joy

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{

the delirium of popular enthusiasm— Lecky

}

Frenzy (see also INSPIRATION) suggests wilder or more violent agitation or disorder than delirium but no less emotional excitement; it is applicable both to a state bordering on a mania

{

an act done in the . . . frenzy of despair— Freeman

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and to one in which for the time being all self-control is lost

{

his hands released her . . . and went up to his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy— Dickens

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{

her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy—D. H. Lawrence

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Hysteria applies strictly to a psychoneurosis simulating organic disease and manifesting such symptoms as disturbance of sensation, motion, and visceral functions expressed typically in functional paralysis, nausea, and emotional excitability

{

a structurally normal arm paralyzed by hysteria

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In ordinary nontechnical language hysteria implies extreme emotional instability that may show itself in swift transitions of mood or from laughing to crying

{

she laughed and cried together ... in a hysteria which she could not control— Bennett

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{

they were gradually worked up to complaisance and then to enthusiasm and then to hysteria and then to acute mania— Mencken

}

Analogous words: depression, dejection, melancholia, melancholy (see SADNESS): *ecstasy, transport: excitement, provocation (see corresponding verbs at PROVOKE)