EXCERPT By what signs shall we recognise the maniac? In the works of Emil Kraepelin, foundational for twentieth-century psychiatry, we encounter a figure whose implacable ‘busyness’ makes him a ‘stranger to fatigue’, and in whom an intense ‘pressure of activity’ (origin unknown) impels a lavish ‘flow’ of ideas. This condensation of a specific symptomatology for mania (as opposed to its blanket meaning of ‘madness’) has recently been reformulated in DSM-5, according to which the maniac taps into inexhaustible reservoirs of energy to fuel an unchecked spiritual dilation…