Attacks Based on Insanity in the Context of Forensic Psychiatry in Ottoman Society (1831-1917)

In today's psychiatry literature, the phenomenon of insanity is either incompletely defined or not defined at all. However, in social life, especially in the media, the actions that result in injury or death of people who have brought insanity continue to exist as a sad state of affairs. In this research, the insanity attacks that occurred as a result of a sudden outburst of anger in Ottoman society were discussed. The cases of insanity in the Ottoman society were examined with examples from the dimension of forensic psychiatry. In the scan made on the Ottoman Archive Document Scanning System (BETSIS) of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey State Archives, 288 insanity cases were detected. Among these, 47 cases between 1831-1917, which were included in the research and resulted in injury or death by people who went insane, were included in the study. In addition to these, the research universe was created by adding two cases of insanity in Avni Mahmud's book titled Muhtasar Emrâz-ı Akliye. Qualitative research method and retrospective/regressive technique were used in this study. The data were evaluated by content analysis. Descriptive analysis of the digitized data was done in Pivot Table. As a result, it was seen that the health checks of the people who went insane in the Ottoman State were taken into account in the name of personal rights and the judicial and administrative order, and these people were sent to the hospital, hospital and Medicine School by the courthouse, police and other institutions. It is understood that in these units, the procedures related to the surveillance, diagnosis and treatment processes are carried out by the specialist physicians in accordance with the legislation in force regarding whether their mental health is in place, and they report the decisions regarding the criminal capacity of the accused and send them to the competent authorities. Among the cases examined, it was determined that 100% of the insanity incidents were carried out by men and that 80 people were harmed in total from 49 insanity attacks.