[A novel approach to the mental health condition of the great Hungarian painter, Csontváry].

Csontvary (1853-1919), the great Hungarian painter was retrospectively diagnosed by psychiatrists as having paraphrenia expansiva or schizotypal personality disorder, respectively. He conducted a double life: beside his regular, productive artistic and private life, he also had a long lasting, secrectly kept mystical connection with higher powers, in his own words "perhaps God". However, his handwritten diary drafts suggest that he was suffering eventually from an affective disorder. We analyzed the 400 pages of this diary as well as 200 pages of an antology with testimonies of his contemporaries. Using the data of some of the Csontvary literature comprising over 500 references, we analysed his life events focusing on the data and episodes, looking for putative psychopathological, including affective manifestations. We could define a total of 39 events relative to our topic. 6 episodes turned out to be just normal. In 4 cases we could not define their exact nature, because of insufficient data. 29 out of the 39 events, along with 24 testimonies of contemporaries seemed to be pathological, demonstrating clearly the features of an affective disorder, such as elevated mood, euphoria; ego- diastole; impulsive behaviour; rapid thinking and speech; a tendency to logorrhea and graphomania; increased mental and psychomotor activities; megalomania; a decrease in judicial faculty but no complete loss of it; and occasionally some tendency to incoherence. Our results suggest the presence of sporadic and minor affective manifestations . However, we found only one questio nable episode of a depression. This can be due to the fact that for long periods of time the painter lived in isolation thus hiding an eventual depression. This new approach, the possibility of an affective disorder in the painter's history can help us to better understand some open questions concerning his life and work. However, it also seems clear that his pathological manifestations did not significantly impact his dominantly integral mental health nor the extraordinary high level of his artistic achievement. Keywords: analysis of life events; testimonies of contemporaries ; a dominantly integral mental health ; rare and minor affective manifestations; remarkable artistic achievement.