Mania is a state of psychomotor excitation. Its onset most often comes through inversion of a melancholic mood, either spontaneously or owing to treatment for depression.

The manic mood is euphoric, changeable, and accompanied by emotional hyperesthesia. The subject exhibits pathological optimism with an overestimation of the self and unrealistic plans that sometimes lead to delusions along megalomaniacal lines (grandeur, omnipotence, messianism). The expansiveness of mania is associated with agitation, expressed in hyperactivity and hypermimia. It is also accompanied by tachypsychia ("rushing thoughts"), an acceleration of the thought processes externally manifested in logorrhea, graphorrhea, hypermnesia, and distractibility. Hypersyntony, a immediate and increased receptivity to stimuli from the outside world and a loss of the ability to discriminate between important facts and details, gives the impression that the subject is...