Moral insanity

Moral insanity was a type of mental disorder made up of abnormal emotions and behaviours with no apparent intellectual impairment, delusions or hallucinations. It was an accepted diagnosis in Europe and America through the second half of the 19th century. The physician James Cowles Prichard first used the phrase for a mental disorder in 1835 in his Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind, defining it as madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits and moral dispositions. The idea owed a debt to Philippe Pinel, who had described insanity without delusion, in which personality might be distorted while the intellect stayed intact. The word moral then meant the affective or inner life rather than ethics. This record documents a historical diagnosis, not medical advice.