In 1790, early in the French Revolution, an ambitious doctor, Phillipe Pinel, a student of madness, observed that the national mind was flooded with vigour "as though by some electric virtue, the systems of nerves and muscles of a new life."

Everywhere in Paris, he said, he heard people saying: "I feel better since the revolution."

A bare three years later as physician at the Bicetre hospital, an asylum/prison on the southern outskirts of Paris, he began his programme of reform by drawing up a list of the causes of insanity among its inmates.

The longest column was headed "Events Connected with the Revolution."

Here were cases of enthusiasts whose initial joy had turned to delirium. Others were victims – men who had seen businesses go to the wall and poverty become their new state.

Many had become deranged through fear of requisitions, state witch-hunts and, of course, the ever present, ever sharpened, guillotine.

One man was terrified and convinced that he had no head – it had been chopped by the fierce-some weapon. He searched for and was given, he believed in his insanity, new ones, but never his own.

Women, most little more than helpless onlookers, became stressed "beyond endurance" by events, becoming "pusillanimous and often self-tormenting," lapsing into "a dark despondency of the soul alternating with terror or rage."

Many were traumatised by witnessing both executions and bloody scenes as the Terror raged.

Most, though, had been driven to derangement by the dreadful uncertainty and randomness of a morphing society. Livelihood, family and property could be lost – destroyed overnight.

Emergency state powers, which changed at the whim of the leaders, created paranoia and a state of daily fear. When food, fuel, and medicine ran short, epidemic disease and mass starvation were ever on the horizon – armies raped and pillaged and asylums were requisitioned – the mad and the sick turfed into the streets.

And the inescapable truth at the Terror’s end was, spelled out by Pinel’s protégé and successor, Jean-Etienne Esquirol: "By bringing all the passions into play, by giving greater flight to feigned passions and exaggerating hateful passions….political agitation increases the number of madmen."

For now, facing our own mass upheaval with Brexit, the madmen aren’t roaming the streets – no, they’re in government or advising. There are no monstrous instruments of torture or death hanging over daily dealings, and, as yet, no deaths as medicines dry up, or starvation as foodstuffs fail.

But, by all and increasing accounts, there is a generalised feeling of depression, paranoia, fear of what may or may not come and reports of counselling and mental health services being increasingly accessed.

Earlier this month an article published in the London School of Economics’ journal examined the extent of this impact.

Researchers looked at a dataset of 35,000 people in the UK’s Household Survey and found a statistically significant impact on mental distress since the referendum.

And in almost a mirror image of what Esquirol reported, it was found that people who voted to remain in the EU reported heightened mental distress – from trouble concentrating to unhappiness, depression and feelings of worthlessness since the vote.

Those who voted to leave, meanwhile, reported a lift in life satisfaction following the result. One doesn’t know how they’re feeling today.

We know from the tremendous efforts of voluntary groups both in the UK and in the British enclaves in Europe, that despair is a word that cannot be used too often.

People are in fear of deportation, in fear of having their families split; in fear of having no health care and little money to buy insurance or to prove their financial ability to remain.

In fear of being returned to countries they no longer know, among strangers, awaiting their turn to access services and the very basics.

A local health professional told me she has had pensioners in tears as they ask her what will happen to them.

"What can I tell them?" she asked. "So, I give them anti-depressants which is no answer at all."

And, looking through the forums, there are the others who are still tripping in some mythical sunny uplands, wilfully refusing to look at the cruel facts of what is being done in their name.

Last month at Gloucestershire’s Coroners Court, worries over Brexit were recorded on the suicide certificate of a 76-year-old French national.

France Marie-Louise, said her English husband Peter, had lived in the country "peacefully, respectfully, legally for more than 50 years." But already suffering from depression she became gripped by Brexit fears and agitated over all that was to come. She drowned herself just nine days before the UK’s original leaving date of March 29th.

It was the first time Brexit has been mentioned by a Coroner in a verdict.

I fear it won’t be the last.

I wonder, do Cummings, Johnson, Gove and the Brexit cabal ever stop and think of the personal suffering now and to come?

Surely, like us all, they have the dark nights of the soul?

I doubt it…I think they’re swirling in revolutionary fever and the real terror has still to come.

Pray to God, unlike France, no blood will be spilt in this futile, unnecessary stupidity. We already have liberty, equality, fraternity.