Crying In The Sane
INSANITY AND TEARS
One of the most curious facts connected with madness is the utter absence of tears amid the insane. Whatever the form of madness, tears are conspicuous by their absence, as much in depression of melancholy, or excitement of mania, as in the utter apathy of dementia. If a patient in a lunatic asylum be discovered in tears, it will be found that it is one beginning to recover, or an emotional outbreak in an epileptic who is scarcely truly insane, while actual insane persons appear to have lost the power of weeping; it is only returning reason which can once more unloose the fountain of their tears. Even when a lunatic is telling one in fervid language how she has been deprived of her children, or the outrages that have been perpetrated to herself, her eye is never even moist.
The ready gush of tears which accompanies the plaint of the sane woman contrasts strangely with the dry-eyed appeal of the talkative lunatic. It would indeed seem that tears give relief to feeling which, when pent up, lead to madness. It Is one of the privileges of reason to be able to weep. Amid all the misery of the insane they find no relief in tears.