Lycanthropy as a mental disease

There are medical cases of dementia in which the victim believes he or she is a werewolf. The hallucinations under which lycanthropists suffered may have arisen from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard the werewolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do not deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation for them to regard him as a lycanthropist.
Examples of lycanthropy are only now being linked to schizophrenia having very few cases to study in our present institutions makes this disease difficult to study in-depth.