This success brought L.'s paranoia to the pinnacle of unreason.
He attacked the courts boldly, openly and publicly accused the
judges of corruption, said they were in conspiracy with the Bar
and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his
enemies the Irish and the Catholic Church, because the
prosecuting attorney in one county and the judge in that court
were Irish and Catholic, and then turned against his wife because
she now began to doubt his sanity. He brought suits in every
superior court in the State, and at the time he was committed to
an Insane Hospital he had forty trials on, had innumerable
manuscripts of his contemplated reforms, in which were included
the doing away with Insane Hospitals, the examination of all
persons in the State for venereal disease and their cure by a new
remedy of his own, the reform of the judiciary, etc., etc. He
accused his wife of infidelity, felt that he was being followed
by spies and police, claimed that dictagraphs were installed
everywhere to spy on him and had a classical delusional state. He
was committed, but later he escaped from the hospital and is now
at large. The State officials are making no effort to find him,
mainly because they are glad to get rid of him.
While the cases like L. are not common, the "mildly" paranoid
personality is common. Everywhere one finds the man or woman
whose abilities are not recognized, who is discriminated against,
who finds an enemy in every one who does not kotow and who
interprets as hostile every action not directly conciliating or
friendly. In every group of people there is one whose paranoid
temperament must be reckoned with, who is distrustful, conceited
and disruptive. Often they are high-minded, perhaps devoted to an
ideal, and if they convince others of their wrongs they increase
the social disharmonies by creating new social wars, large or
small according to their influence, intelligence and other
circumstances.
The type of the trusting need not be here illustrated by any case
history. Dickens has given us an immortal figure in the genial,
generous and impulsive Mr. Pickwick, and Cervantes satirized
knighthood by depicting the trusting, credulous Don Quixote. We
laugh at these figures, but we love them; they preserve for us
the sweetness of childhood and hurt only themselves and their
own. Trust in one's fellows is not common, because the world is
organized on egoism more than on fellowship. Where fellowship
becomes a code, as in the relations of men associated together
for some great purpose, then a noble trust appears.
So I pass over those whose mood runs all one way the hopeful, the
despondent, the pessimist and the optimist--to other types. We
shall then consider the two great directions of interest,
introspection and extrospection, and those whose lives are
characterized by one or the other direction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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