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Irritability as a Symptom in Manic-Depressives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

W. Mayer-Gross
W. Mayer-Gross*
Affiliation:
Maudsley Hospital, University of London
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Extract

Irritability is used in this paper in its popular sense as “the quality or state of being easily annoyed or excited to anger”, according to the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I leave it an open question how far other meanings of the word—especially “the condition of being excessively or morbidly excitable by or sensitive to the application of an external stimulus”—have anything to do with the definition of irritability as an affective state. A detailed description of the specific emotional quality of irritability would be of little help to someone who had never experienced it. Irritability might be characterized by its accelerated time factor (in contrast, e.g., to sadness, with its slow time factor), by its tension and proneness to release in outward expressions, and by its unrest. But all such characteristics are only descriptions of the same happening looked at from different angles.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Information
Journal of Mental Science , Volume 83 , Issue 342 , January 1937 , pp. 61 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1937 

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