"When the melancholic hallucination has fully taken possession of the mind, it becomes the sole object of attention, without the power of varying the impression, or of directing the thoughts to any facts or considerations calculated to remove or palliate it. The evil seems overwhelming and irremediable, admitting neither of palliation, consolation, nor hope. For the process of mind calculated to diminish such an impression, or even to produce a hope of the palliation of the evil, is precisely that exercise of mind which in this singular condition, is lost or suspended; namely, a power of changing the subject of thought, of transferring the attention to other facts and considerations, and of comparing the mental impression with these, and with the actual state of external things. Under such a conviction of overwhelming and hopeless misery, the feeling naturally arises of life being a burden, and this is succeeded by a determination to quit it. When such an association has once been formed, it also fixes itself upon the mind, and fails to be corrected by those considerations which ought to remove it. That it is in this manner the impression arises, and not from any process analogous to the determination of a sound mind, appears, among other circumstances, from the singular manner in which it is often dissipated, namely by the accidental productions of some new impression not calculated in any degree to influence the subject of thought, but simply to give a momentary direction of the mind to some other feeling. Thus a man mentioned by Pinel had left his house in the night, with the determined resolution of drowning himself, when he was attacked by robbers. He did his best to escape from them, and having done so, returned home, the resolution of suicide being entirely dissipated. A woman mentioned, I believe by Dr. Burrows, had her resolution changed in the same manner, by something falling on her head, after she had gone out for a similar purpose.