Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction TypeHoch, August
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Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type
Hoch, August
Manic-depressive illness; Stupor
As to the frequency of stupor no figures are available, for the simple
reason that the diagnosis in large clinics has not been made with
sufficient accuracy to justify any statistics. Most of these cases are
usually called catatonia, depression, allied to manic-depressive
insanity or allied to dementia præcox. The majority of the stupors
reported in this book were in women, but this is merely the result of
chance, since it has been easier in the Psychiatric Institute to study
functional psychoses in the female division, while the male ward has
been reserved largely for organic psychoses. The majority of the
patients seem to be between 15 and 25 years of age, so that it is,
presumably, a reaction of youthful years. In our experience most cases
occur among the lower classes, which agrees with the opinion of Wilmanns
who found this tendency among prisoners.
This gives a brief description of the deep stupor. But even our typical
cases did not present this picture during the entire psychosis. They
showed phases when, superficially viewed, they were not in stupor but
suffered from the above symptoms as tendencies rather than states. There
are also many psychoses where complete stupor is never developed. This
gives us our justification for speaking of the _stupor reaction_, which
consists of these symptoms (or most of them) no matter in how slight a
degree they may be present. The analogy to mania and hypomania is
compelling. The latter is merely a dilution of the former. Both are
forms of the manic reaction. We consequently regard stupor and partial
stupor as different degrees of the same psychotic process which we term
the stupor reaction. To understand it the symptoms should be separately
analyzed and then correlated.
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