Mental state is generally a literary or legal term, and is only used in psychiatry or psychology as the mental state examination, where it refers to the condition of someone's mind. Here there is an assessment of thought processes, memory, mood, cognitive state, and energy level. Where a mental state is shared by a large proportion of the members of a group or society, it can be called a collective mental state. Le Bon proposed that mental states are passed by contagion, while Freud wrote of war fever, a perfect example of the collective mental state. Borkenau wrote of collective madness, while many writers have discussed collective depression. Psychosis can be passed from one individual to another as induced psychosis or folie a deux, but rarely involves more than two people. Where the mental state involves a large population, it is more appropriate to use plain English rather than psychiatric or psychological terminology.
Famous quotes containing the words collective, mental and/or state:
“Perhaps one reason that many working parents do not agitate for collective reform, such as more governmental or corporate child care, is that the parents fear, deep down, that to share responsibility for child rearing is to abdicate it.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“You know, there’s one thing wrong with living in a palace. It takes so long to get from one place to another. I live in a constant state of exhaustion.”
—Arthur Ross. The Prince (Jack Lemmon)