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

Abstract

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.Comparing the severity of nicotine dependence and smoking behavior in adult smokers with childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder history (CH) versus non-CH smokers is subject of Fond et al.'s [2] meta-analysis. The expected more severe smoking behavior in the CH group was only significant before the age of 20, in adulthood again non-CH smokers drew level. The age of first cigarette differed not significantly, although CH smokers started earlier regularly using tobacco. Since the finding of CH probands consuming more cigarettes each day in adulthood dissolved after removing the only available adolescent study, it needs further studies with adolescents under 20 to investigate a possible association between CH and smoking behavior. Based on consistently reported significant comorbidity between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and affective disorders, Di Nicola et al. [3] hypothesized co-occurrence of ADHD in patients with bipolar (BD) or major depressive disorder (MDD) to be associated with more maladaptive personality traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion) plus worse clinical characteristics, outcome, and level of functioning. Comparing remitted MDD, euthymic BD patients, and healthy controls confirmed not only the close relationship between affective disorders, particularly BD, and ADHD, but also revealed a significant association between personality traits and ADHD features, for which reason possible coexisting ADHD should regularly be assessed in patients with affective disorders.Meanwhile, there is an increasing focus on the impact of genetics on ADHD: Since methylphenidate, a first-line medication for ADHD mostly affects the dopamine transporter SLC6A3/DAT1, playing a key role in regulating dopaminergic neurotransmission; Azeredo et al. [4] in their genetic association study analyzed the -839 C/T (rs2652511) promoter variant and the 3 0 -untranslated region and intron 8 variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) polymorphisms in 522 adults with ADHD and 628 blood donor controls. They found a signific...

Is there a specific Vivaldi effect on verbal memory functions? Evidence from listening to music in younger and older adults

“…As an intriguing yet hard to prove note, it cannot be excluded that composer-specific music contains hard-to-identify elements in musical micro-and macro-structure reflecting the composer's personality or mentality. For Mozart, for example, a psychiatric disturbance has been suspected (Monaco, Servo, & Cavanna, 2009;Schmitt & Falkai, 2014), which may have penetrated to shape the repetitions of the main melodies/melodic lines in his compositions (Hughes, 2002).…”

Who says this is a modern disorder? The early history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

“…Indeed, although for the most part, disruptive behaviors we would now acknowledge as symptoms of ADHD, historically could be attributed to youthful exuberance or a simple lack of discipline [22] , Mozart [23,24] , or Lord Byron [25] could have had ADHD. It has been even hypothesized, from descriptions of his disruptive behavior as recorded in the Scriptures that the Apostle Peter might have suffered from ADHD [26] .…”