I state the foregoing, as it explains much of the working of my mind during insanity. She was even alarmed at my temerity in daring to utilise him as 'copy,' as I informed her I had done. The woman was most terrified of this 'spirit,' whom she declared to be an evil, and extraordinarily powerful, one. The Maniac: a realistic study of madness from the maniac’s point of view She also recounted a great many of her personal “spiritualistic' experiences. Working at the office in the same room and at the same table as Miss Thelmar was an elderly married woman, a non-professional, spiritualistic 'medium.” She used to 'see' all sorts of “spirits ' and other phenomena surrounding the various people in the office, and whenever work was slack she used to pass the time by giving a detailed account to whoever happened to be in the room, of what she ‘saw’ around each and all of them. She lived alone in a one-room lodging near Regent's park. At the time the narrative was written and the illness took hold, she had begun working as a journalist on a London magazine, and worked all day at the office of the paper in the Strand.

Miss E Thelmar was an unmarried woman, ‘the wrong side of thirty’. That this is so, is indubitably proved to anyone who has experienced madness-and will be apparent to anyone who reads this narrative. The location, the extent, and, above all, the limitations of a mad patient's consciousness are so wholly misjudged and misapprehended. I emphasised the reservation, of whatever I was conscious, because the most highly-trained 'mental' doctors and nurses are, evidently, most utterly at sea with regard to a lunatic's Consciousness. To transcribe the entire account, verbatim, has been but the smallest effort of memory on my part. If any one doubts the possibility of such accuracy, I simply say that from first to last, throughout the attack of madness, everything of which I was conscious at the time that it occurred, and everything that was spoken either by me, or by the ' Voices ' to me remained fixed on my memory with such curious indelibility it was as if it had been branded thereon. Throughout the narrative the words spoken by the various 'Voices' to me, and my replies thereto, are given verbatim, and, I honestly believe, with as exact verbal accuracy as if they had been taken down by shorthand reporter at the time they were being uttered. The whole was written down during the months immediately after the attack, and while remembrance of it was as vivid as at the actual time of its occurrence. Nothing has been invented-from first to last, this is a true record.

THE following is a faithful account of a genuine attack of Acute Mania. The Maniac – A Realistic Study of Madness from the Maniac’s Point of View – E Thelmar

The Maniac by E. Thelmar