The states of mental defect and degeneration are not sharply defined. They run more or less into one another. The fact should also be kept in mind that isolated symptoms and groups of symptoms belonging to them are repeatedly found in curable conditions of physical and mental exhaustion in neurotic persons. The degenerative mental states are thought to be increasing, to furnish material for the increase in the otherwise curable insanities, and to thus include much of that portion of the community which is most filling up our institutions with incurable cases. It is probably in the prevention of them, or at least in the proper training and disposition of children affected with them or predisposed to them, that the most can be done to stay the increase of insanity. Perhaps at some time unwise marriages of passion and sentiment will be less common than now, and the rights of children to a fair start in life more considered. Psychoneuroses. AFFECTIVE MENTAL DISEASE is a folie raisonnante, one of the reasoning insanities, sometimes called moral insanity, and very like the moral {154} insanity already described, except in the absence of signs of mental degeneration and in the fact that it is a curable disorder. It is an insanity of action, marked by scarcely noticeable mental impairment. It often is the early stage of more serious mental disease, and not seldom its symptoms remain, as simply change of character, after the striking symptoms of extensive mental disorder have disappeared. It also exists and is cured without the appearance of more pronounced insanity. At the time of the climacteric it is a form of mental disorder not uncommon among women, who, however, usually fail to recognize it as such until they have recovered. Maudsley includes under this head simple melancholia, simple mania, and moral alienation, but it will be more convenient for the present purpose to use the term affective mental disease as indicating a curable moral alienation or change of character affecting the intellect chiefly so far as the judgment and sense of propriety only are concerned, and not dependent upon constitutional defect or developed degenerative mental state. There is usually slight exhilaration or depression, which alternates or varies from time to time. The PROGNOSIS is favorable. The TREATMENT is brain-nutrition, with those general measures already described.