Economies are melting all over the world and the resulting heat seems to be having a strange effect on many brains.

Examples are not lacking. The suddenly excited, power-seizing behaviour of members of the Canadian Parliament is clearly not normal but how to define the pathology? Consider political neurasthenia.

Neurasthenia was a diagnosis invented in the 19th century by an American neurologist George Miller Beard, but it has now fallen into disfavour.

The condition arose, he said, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves by modern civilization.

According to Beard, the intellectual and upper classes were particularly at risk from this condition because of the pressures generated by an uncertain and competitive business environment.

Typically, it was associated with individuals in sedentary employment, like those who sit behind large desks.

Financial psychopathy

Among the symptoms, Beard enumerated, were anxiety, headaches, and impotence.

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, from right, Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli, Ford CEO Alan Mulally, testifying at a U.S. Senate banking committee hearing on the crisis in the automotive industry. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press) The Associated Press

One of the most famous sufferers was the philosopher William James. He offered this self-diagnosis: "I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide."

Anxiety, impotence, the urge to political suicide — the symptoms seem to fit many in the parliamentary elite.

There are other forms of meltdown that might be considered at times like these.

Financial psychopathy, the inability to sympathize, indeed to understand the economic pain of others, can be seen rearing its twisted head.

A couple of weeks ago, the leaders of the American car companies took their tin cups to Washington to ask for help, at least $28 billion worth of taxpayer relief, it turns out.

Their companies teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, yet each CEO chose to fly in to town on his company's corporate jet for this begging mission.

One bemused congressman said it was like seeing a man showing up at the soup kitchen in top hat and tails. A second legislator asked the corporate chieftains to signify, by word or upraised arm, if they planned to sell their jets. Silence and stillness at the witness table.

A final question. Would the bosses of Ford and General Motors like to follow the lead of their Chrysler colleague and work for $1 a year? More silence.

Then these words of sublime self-containment from the head of Ford: "I think where we are is okay." Last year, he collected almost $25 million from the company coffers.

Crossing the Atlantic

The pathology has crossed the Atlantic. In Britain, banks have stared into the abyss of bankruptcy only to be pulled back with massive public bailouts. One of them promptly celebrated with huge bashes.

The Royal Bank of Scotland received almost $40 billion in taxpayer money. It held not one but two parties, the first in Edinburgh at an estimated cost of $600,000; the second at Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home, at a cost of $60,000.

In their possibly psychopathic state, the bosses of the bank still somehow understood that these parties might not be fully appreciated by the general public.

So they tried to hide them, moving the bigger one at the last minute from one location to Edinburgh to put people off the scent.

When they were found out, the bank spokesman offered this cut gem of financial psychopathy: "This was an entirely appropriate staff event to recognise outstanding performance by a small number of our staff."

Sluggish schizophrenia

Latvia is a former Soviet republic, now a member of NATO and the European Union. But cases of sluggish schizophrenia are still being diagnosed, appropriately by the country's security services.

Sluggish schizophrenia was a favorite pathology used by the Soviet state to arrest and lock up dissidents.

Today, it appears that it is being applied in the case of Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a lecturer in economics.

In a roundtable discussion reported by the newspaper in Ventspils, Smirnovs is on the record saying, "All I can advise is this: first, don't keep money in banks. Second, don't keep money in lats."

The lat is the Latvian currency. Smirnovs made his comment somewhat jokingly but a few weeks later one of Latvia's biggest banks was taken over by the state and then went cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund for financial help.

Smirnovs, for his part, was picked up in front of his house by agents of the Latvian security service. His computer was seized. His suspected crime was "spreading rumour or untruthful information about the financial system." It's on the books in Latvia.

Feverish brows

In this case, the patient suffering from sluggish schizophrenia appears to be the state itself, not the individual. "It's a form of deterrence," the country 's secretary of finance said of the arrest. Deterrence, apparently, against economic panic.

"This is part of our political culture," said Sergei Kruks, a media-studies lecturer. "If the state doesn't have a solution, it has to find someone to blame." Soviet psychiatrists would understand.

Smirnovs understood he was dealing with a form of madness. After all, a pop musician had also been arrested for a making a joke about the country's banks.

"As a medicine, it only makes people more worried," Smirnovs said of his detainment. But he will be more careful about what he says in public.

Back across the Atlantic, there is good news. There are, sometimes, cures.

On their second trip to Washington from Detroit, the leaders of the American automakers left their jets at the airport and drove all the way in their company cars.

The cold wind of economic reality can cool some feverish brows, it seems. At least until it is time for the next party to begin.