Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type — John Shaqi
Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction TypeHoch, August
Science
Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type
Hoch, August
Manic-depressive illness; Stupor
On the second day, while sitting at breakfast, she groped
about for the bread plate for some time and then said she
had been blind for a short time. During the day she had
frequent spells in which she would close her eyes, become
perfectly quiet and difficult to rouse. Sometimes at the
beginning of these spells she would say “I am going.” She
was then taken to her aunt and walked there, a distance of
a few blocks. She was there for two days before going to
the Observation Pavilion. In this time she is said to have
been quiet for the most part, often apparently sleeping or
staring. Once she said she was “rather dirty, filthy.” Once
she tried to get out of the window, said it was a door and
that she wanted to get out and take a walk. Above all, she
had, in these two days, repeated peculiar seizures which
the aunt and the husband described as follows: When sitting
on a chair she would close her eyes, clench her fists,
pound the side of the chair, get stiff, slide on the floor,
then thrash her arms and legs about and move the head to
and fro. She frothed at the mouth. After the attack, which
lasted a few minutes, she breathed heavily for a while.
Once she wiped off the froth with a handkerchief and gave
the latter to the aunt, saying “Burn that, it is poison.”
Before the attack she sometimes said that it got dark over
her eyes and that her face felt funny, again that she had a
pain in the stomach which worked towards her right
shoulder. There was no cry in the beginning of the attack,
but once she wet herself.
After recovery the patient herself told the development of
her psychosis thus:
There was trouble between the father and the husband, and
she was afraid of her father. On the day of the christening
she took sick: a queer feeling came over her and she
wondered whether she was going to die, “Then I seemed to
lose myself, and when I came to I found my family standing
around me.” Her father gave her whiskey and she thought it
was poison. “That night I had spells of dancing and
singing, it must have been something I took, perhaps the
liquor.” The same night she was frightened, thought her
father might do some harm, and had a vision of a person in
white standing at her bed. After that she had repeated
spells in which she knew nothing until “I came to again.”
“It was a queer trembling.”
At the _Observation Pavilion_ she was described as in a
state of “intense mental depression,” taking no interest in
things going on about her. She spoke, however; said she
wanted to die, that she had imagined her father had given
her poison, that every one was against her, and that people
were talking about her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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