Henry Calderwood, a nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher, published an 1879 work examining the interaction between philosophy of mind, early neuroscience, and mental disease. Holding a spiritual view of the mind, he argued that the phrase 'mental disease' is a misleading metaphor. His detailed analysis of contemporary research by Ferrier, Clouston, Crichton-Browne, Maudsley, Tuke, and Sankey concluded that their findings offered very limited explanatory power for understanding madness. The authors contend that Calderwood's conceptual contribution should be added to the growing list of nineteenth-century writers who began constructing a 'philosophy of alienism' (now 'philosophy of psychiatry').
Autoscopy is a visual experience in which a person sees an image of themselves in external space from within their own body. A review of 53 published cases since 1935 plus three personally observed patients found 38 men and 18 women, average age 39.5 years. Neurological illness, most often epilepsy, occurred in 59% of subjects, and psychiatric disorder in 59%, commonly delirium, depression, or psychosis. Speaking images were associated with younger age, male sex, psychotic illness, longer image duration, and hypnagogic/hypnopompic experiences. Autoscopy may result from a convergence of gender, personality, neurological and psychiatric disease, exhaustion, and dissociation overriding normal inhibition of temporal lobe activity.