A patient has been persistently cheerful, expansive, and overly familiar with strangers for several weeks, describing life as generally wonderful and full of good feeling, but without any sense of mystical transcendence, unity, or profound cosmic significance when asked to elaborate. Before revealing the answer: is this ecstasy?

No, this is more consistent with morbid euphoria than with ecstasy. The mood here is sustained and generally cheerful and expansive, but lacks the greater intensity and the characteristic mystical, transcendent quality that defines ecstasy specifically. Ecstasy would involve a sense of rapture, unity, or profound cosmic significance going well beyond ordinary good feeling, which this patient explicitly does not describe when asked directly.