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The Maniac – A Realistic Study of Madness from the Maniac’s Point of View – E Thelmar

On Monday afternoon, November 6th, when I had just finished tea (with my favourite nurse, who, I believe, had come on day-duty that very day only, for she was not the one on duty when the doctor asked me about my being Mrs. Ray Hall), quite suddenly I felt a change take place in my head.

The noise going on ceaselessly in my head- voices and sounds-had, until that moment, resembled exactly the rushing, roaring sound one hears in one's head when seated in an express train speeding through a tunnel.

The sensation I experienced at the moment of which I write, resembled exactly the emerging, in the express train, from the tunnel.

Sounds still went on in my head, just as sounds still go on in one's head all the time one is travelling by express train; but the difference and relief of emerging into the open after the roaring sounds of a tunnel, everyone has experienced and understands; and that, with quite curious exactness of simile, was precisely the difference and relief that I suddenly experienced.

I said to the nurse- "Oh! Nurse, my head .does feel so much better!"

She said, "Does it? I am so glad!”

But I believe she did not think my remark of sufficient importance to note or report to the doctor. From that date I was sane...............

FROM beginning to end my madness had lasted from Friday night, September 29th, until Monday afternoon, November 6th. My doctor (who is a Mental Specialist at several London hospitals) has told me that the above period is just about half only of the usual shortest period for the duration of an attack of that form of acute mania. He told me he considered it a phenomenally quick recovery................

The thankfulness I felt on regaining sanity, at finding that there really was human help at hand, cannot be realised by any one who has not, as I had, experienced weeks and weeks of agony, and in the full belief that there was no help, human or Divine, to be found anywhere. This unspeakable thankfulness was what I felt the moment I returned to sanity, and found that a competent human helper really had “disentangled that snarl " of my bewilderingly tangled "Fate" for me, and restored me to sanity and freed me from torments.