by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Editor) Format: Paperback

What is insanity? A disease of the mind? A disorder of the brain? Or a failure of human beings to adjust to the world around them?

First published in 1901, Charles Mercier's Sanity and Insanity remains one of the most provocative and accessible explorations of mental disorder ever written. Rejecting superstition, moral condemnation, and simplistic medical explanations, Mercier sought to understand insanity scientifically—through the relationships among the brain, the mind, behavior, heredity, and the social environment.

In this classic work, Mercier argues that insanity is not merely a collection of strange thoughts or unusual beliefs. Rather, it is a disorder of the individual's ability to adjust to life's circumstances. Drawing on psychiatry, psychology, law, biology, and philosophy, he examines questions that remain central today:

• What distinguishes sanity from insanity?

• How are mind and brain related?

• What role does heredity play in mental illness?

• Why do stress, trauma, and life changes trigger mental breakdowns?

• How should society understand responsibility, crime, and mental disorder?

This new edition, edited and introduced by distinguished criminologist Graeme R. Newman, places Mercier's ideas in historical and scientific context. The introduction examines Mercier's influential theories of heredity and mental illness in light of contemporary psychiatric genetics, showing both where he anticipated modern science and where later discoveries have transformed our understanding of mental disorder.

Part history, part psychology, and part philosophy of mind, Are You Mad? offers modern readers a fascinating window into the origins of scientific psychiatry and the enduring debate over what it means to be sane.

For students, scholars, clinicians, criminologists, and anyone interested in the history of mental health, this remarkable work remains as challenging and relevant today as when it first appeared more than a century ago.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 286p.

by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Author)

What is madness? How does reason fail? When does unusual behavior become mental illness? And what responsibilities do society, medicine, and the law have toward those whose minds are disordered?

Originally published in the early twentieth century, Charles Mercier's A Textbook of Madness and Other Mental Diseases is one of the most influential and intellectually ambitious works in the history of psychiatry. A pioneering psychiatrist and leading authority on insanity, Mercier sought to do more than describe mental illness—he attempted to explain its nature, causes, classification, and relationship to human conduct.

Rejecting the conventional view that insanity is simply a disorder of thought, Mercier argued that madness is fundamentally a disorder of conduct. Through careful observation and analysis, he developed a comprehensive theory linking desire, will, feeling, thought, and memory to the ways individuals function in society. His groundbreaking hierarchical model of the mind anticipated many modern concerns with judgment, self-control, insight, and behavioral regulation.

This new edition features an extensive introduction by renowned criminologist Graeme R. Newman, placing Mercier's work within the context of modern psychiatry, psychology, criminology, neuroscience, and forensic mental health. Newman explores the enduring relevance of Mercier's ideas and their continuing influence on debates surrounding mental illness, criminal responsibility, social control, and human behavior.

Inside this volume, readers will discover:

• Mercier's pioneering definition of insanity as a disorder of conduct

• A detailed hierarchical theory of mental functioning

• Early classifications of mental illness and their historical development

• Analyses of delusions, hallucinations, dementia, paranoia, mania, and melancholia

• Discussions of crime, punishment, and criminal responsibility

• The legal treatment of insanity in Britain during the early twentieth century

• Insights into the social, biological, and psychological causes of mental disorder

• A scholarly introduction connecting Mercier's theories to contemporary research

Part historical document, part psychiatric treatise, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of human behavior, A Textbook of Madness and Other Mental Diseases remains an essential work for students and scholars of psychiatry, psychology, criminology, law, sociology, and the history of medicine.

More than a century after its first publication, Mercier's enduring questions continue to resonate: What is sanity? What is madness? And how should society respond when the boundaries between them become uncertain?

An indispensable classic of psychiatric thought, now available in a modern scholarly edition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 218p.

by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Author)

In 1901, the physician and alienist Charles Mercier set out to do something almost nobody had attempted: build one complete theory of mind that covered sanity and insanity alike, on the theory that you cannot understand madness until you understand the ordinary mind it departs from. The result is this book — four hundred pages of sustained, systematic ambition, mapping sensation, thought, will, memory, pleasure, pain, and the sense of self as a single connected machine, with delusion treated not as a foreign invasion of the mind but as ordinary belief, strained past its working tolerance.

It is a genuinely strange book to read now, and that is exactly why it's worth reading. Mercier's nervous system runs on "motion," flowing through tissue like steam through pipework — a mechanical metaphor pushed further than the science of the day could really support. He proposes scrapping the syllogism in favor of six modes of reasoning entirely his own invention, argued with total seriousness across a hundred pages, and it persuaded almost nobody. His system did not outlast the decade. And yet buried inside the wreckage of that system is a genuinely durable idea: that delusion sits on a continuum with everyday belief, rather than in a category of its own — a claim psychiatry spent most of the twentieth century arguing its way back to.

This new edition presents Mercier's text in full, extensively cleaned of over a century of accumulated OCR and scanning damage, with British-Victorian spelling and phrasing left exactly as written. A new critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman situates the book against its contemporaries — it appeared eleven years after William James's Principles of Psychology and just before Freud reached English readers — and reads it honestly: neither a lost masterpiece nor a curiosity, but a serious system that got some of the biggest questions in psychiatry wrong in interesting ways, and one genuinely important thing right early.

What's inside:

• The complete original text of Mercier's 1901 classic, unabridged

• A new critical introduction assessing Mercier's system against James, Freud, and the psychiatry that followed

• Extensive restoration of scan-damaged passages, with any unrecoverable material left honestly marked rather than guessed at

• Six major sections: Sensation, Thought, Volition, Memory, Pleasure and Pain, and Subject-Consciousness

Companion volume: How to Run a Lunatic Asylum, Mercier's 1894 administrative manual, applies the same systematizing temperament at the scale of the institution rather than the mind.

For readers who enjoy:

• The history of psychiatry and psychology before Freud

• Victorian and Edwardian systems of thought — ambitious, confident, and often wrong in illuminating ways

• Primary sources that reward a critical rather than a reverent reading

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 397p.

By Ciara Molloy

In the late 1970s, a criminal-based youth subculture known as the Bugsy Malones emerged in inner-city Dublin. Through the use of oral history interviews, this article avails of ‘proximate voices’ to shed light on the Bugsy Malones’ socio-economic background, their individual and group characteristics, and the rise of a subcultural mythology because of the involvement of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch (a well-known Irish figure linked to organised crime) with the subculture. These proximate voices comprise n = 10 individuals who encountered the Bugsy Malones in a personal or professional capacity and shared lived experiences, physical spaces and/or interests with them. By capturing such voices, the article transcends caricatured press coverage and generates enhanced insight into this largely forgotten subculture.

Irish Economic and Social History, 51(1), 113-130.

By Jetson Leder-Luis and Anup Malani

Healthcare fraud imposes a sizable cost on U.S. public healthcare budgets and distorts health care provision. We examine the economics of health care fraud and enforcement using theory and data and connect to a growing literature on the topic. We first offer a new economic definition of health care fraud that captures and connects the wide range of activities prosecuted as fraud. We define fraud as any divergence between the care an insurer says a patient qualifies for, the care a provider provides, and the care a provider bills for. Our definition clarifies the economic consequences of different categories of fraud and provides a framework for understanding the slate of existing studies. Next, we examine the incentives for committing and for prosecuting fraud. We show how fraud is driven by a combination of inadequate (expected) penalties for fraud and imperfect reimbursement rates. Public anti-fraud litigation is driven by the relative monetary, political or career returns to prosecuting fraud and by prosecutorial budgets. Finally, we examine the prevalence of health care fraud prosecutions across types of fraud and types of care, and across the US, by machine learning on text data from Department of Justice press releases.

WORKING PAPER · NO. 2025-45

Chicago: University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics 2025. 45p

By Yuxi Shang , Zhongxian Wu , Xiaoyu Du3, Yanbin Jiang , Beibei Ma , Meihong Chi

Criminals targeting and exploiting older adults in online environments are of great concern. This study systematically retrieved and analyzed articles on the psychological characteristics of older adult victims of online fraud. First, we found that there was no evidence that older adults were more prevalent than other individuals of other ages among online fraud victims, and current researchers have focused more on why older adults are easy targets for fraud (susceptibility to being cheated). Second, research on psychological factors of older adults' susceptibility to online fraud has mainly focused on cognitive function, trust traits, and other personality traits, such as social loneliness, the Big Five personality traits, and self-control. Among them, most researchers claim that the cyber-cheating of older adults may be due to a decline in their cognitive function. However, there has not been a consensus on how cognitive function and physical and mental conditions affect older people who are cheated. Third, techniques (i.e., methods and techniques used by fraudsters) and experience (i.e., familiarity with internet technology or fraud) may be related to the susceptibility of older adults to fraud, and these studies have also not yet generated a consensus supported by reliable data. Based on the above research uncertainties, we propose that fraud prevention and control strategies for older adults should be applied with caution.

Front Psychol. 2022 Sep 5;13:912242. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.912242. PMID: 36132192; PMCID: PMC9484557

Edited by Ann Rigney and Thomas Smits

Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms in on the role of photography in this memory-activism nexus. How do iconographic conventions shape images of protest? Why do some images keep movements in the public eye, while others are quickly forgotten? What role do images play in linking different protests, movements, and generations of activists? Have the affordances of digital media made it easier for activists to use images in their memory politics, or has the digital production and massive online exchange of images made it harder to identify and remember a movement via a single powerful image? Bringing together experts in visual culture, cultural memory, social movements, and digital humanities, this collection presents new empirical, theoretical, and methodological insights into the visual memory of protest.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.233p.

By Cecilia Jacob | Cecilia.Jacob and

Mujeeb Kanth |

Hate speech and incitement have been instrumental in atrocity crimes that have occurred in India, even prior to its independence. These atrocities include targeted killings of minorities based on religious and ethnic identity, and demonstrate persistent features of systematic, orchestrated violence that is fuelled by a Hindu nationalist ideology. This ideology is routinely promulgated at the highest levels of political leadership. This article traces both the historical and institutional character of hate speech and incitement in India to understand its repeated manifestation over time. Through case studies of recent violence, it considers the implications of new legal developments, technology and the covid-19 pandemic on the character and dynamic of hate speech, incitement and atrocity violence in India. It considers key reforms and areas for accountability on which the international community could engage the government and civil society in India on the issue of hate speech and incitement to promote atrocity prevention at the domestic level.

Global Responsibility to Protect 15 (2023) 209–245

By David Spencer

In this policy note we outline the origins of Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs), the approach by police forces to recording them and their threefold impact: (1) distracting police officers from focusing on what should be the core mission of policing to fight crime, (2) curtailing the employment prospects of individual members of the public through inappropriate disclosures of NCHIs, and (3) having a broader chilling effect on freedom of expression in our society. The origins of NCHIs can be found in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, published in 1999, which recommended that the police formally log “racist incidents” that did not reach the threshold of being a criminal offence. Subsequently expanded to cover other types of incident, NCHIs were entrenched in policing practice through the College of Policing’s 2014 ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’. As a result of a successful legal challenge in 2021, R (on the application of Miller) v College of Policing, the previous Government exercised its statutory power to introduce a new Code of Practice for the recording of NCHIs in June 2023. Until this point NCHIs had no formal basis in legislation whatsoever. The Code of Practice, issued pursuant section 60 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, defines Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) as: “an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated - wholly or partly - by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.” This paper demonstrates that the protections which Parliament and the previous Government attempted to introduce through this Code of Practice have been largely ineffective. A recent Inspection by His Majesty’s Inspectorate for Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) shows that police forces have been willing entirely to ignore – and in fact to act contrary to – the Code of Practice. Out of 120 case files examined by HMICFRS sixteen NCHIs and fourteen hate crimes had been incorrectly recorded by police forces – an error rate of 25%. Of the 120 cases that HMICFRS reviewed, police had incorrectly recorded seven incidents on school premises. That police forces are failing to get it right is no surprise – their track record in this domain has been poor. In 2021, Merseyside Police were rightly criticised for producing a false and misleading advertising campaign which contained the slogan “BEING OFFENSIVE IS AN OFFENCE” – revealing that the officers involved were entirely wrong in their understanding of the law. A senior officer in the force subsequently withdrew the campaign and attempted to shift the blame onto the “local policing team on the Wirral”. Police forces continue to be highly opaque in their approach to NCHIs – producing little clarity over their policies or data relating to the recording of NCHIs. What data does exist shows that there is very wide variation in rates of reporting between police forces. Essex Police, records NCHIs at a rate of 21.5 NCHIs per 100 officers per annum in 2023 – a rate three times that of the Met, four times that of Greater Manchester and ten times that of West Yorkshire. The number of NCHIs recorded per 100 officers per annum is 7.2 in the Metropolitan Police, 5.72 in Greater Manchester Police and 2.4 in West Yorkshire Police. This compares to an estimated national rate in the 12 months to June 2024 of 8.9 NCHIs recorded per 100 officers. The distraction of police officers from other, more important activities is of grave concern to great swathes of the public – particularly given NCHIs do not involve allegations of criminality. In many cases Police and Crime Commissioners have been insufficiently robust in ensuring that forces have been focused on the fight against crime. In doing so it appears that PCCs are demonstrating an undue regard for an expansive understanding of police chiefs’ ‘operational independence’ – something the public will not thank them for. (continued)

London: Policy Exchange, 2024. 38p.