Historical aspects of Mozart’s mental health and diagnostic insights of ADHD and personality disorders

Excerpt

In the last decades, psychiatrists ascribed diverse psychiatric disorders to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, among them the Tourette syndrome. The latter primarily based on fancy erotic letters Mozart wrote to his cousin, containing excessive wordplays plus coprolalia, echolalia, or palilalia, often associated with this syndrome. To this effect, Möller [1] in his review critically scrutinizes Mozart’s reported personality traits, time-typical fashion of self-expression (namely his hyperactivity), his correspondence with other persons, expressive and intentional aspects plus biography and medical history. As to language, Möller clarifies that vulgar speech was not only more common in the baroque than nowadays but also served the middle class as distinction from the stilted courtly language. Moreover, the writing of Tourette patients even with severe palilalia usually is fluent. Möller thus judges Mozart’s attitude rather as timely and evidence for his suffering from Tourette low. …