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
4. Next day it was noted that she was more stuporous, and
she remained so for two weeks, now showing a decided
tendency to catalepsy and more resistance than before,
though not marked, except in the jaw. She lay often with
head raised, sometimes with eyes partly open, or staring in
a dull, dreamy way, neither soiling nor drooling, however;
a few times she looked up when spoken to sharply. There was
no spontaneous speech. Usually she did not answer at all,
but a few times a short low response was obtained. Once she
wrote slowly a simple addition, put down on paper. When, on
one occasion, asked how she felt, she, as before, said, “I
feel better.”
5. Then, with the exception of a day at the end of the
month, when the more stuporous state was again in evidence,
she returned to her former condition without catalepsy or
resistiveness and without staring, but essentially with
inactivity or slowness. She now even dressed herself,
answered slowly though not consistently, but she again
denied feeling troubled or sad, “I feel better.”
On July 7 she got brighter but was still rather slow. She
then even began to do some work. She again denied feeling
sad.
In a few weeks, while having a temperature of 102° with
vomiting and diarrhea, she suddenly got freer. She then
said, in answer to questions, that she did not speak
because she was not sure whether it would be right, again
because she seemed to lose her speech. She did not move
because she was tired, had a numb feeling. She said she
had not been sad, “but I had different thoughts,” “saw
shadows on the walls of animals, living people and dead
people.” She was not frightened, “I just looked at them.”
People moved so quickly that she thought everything was
moved by electricity. She thought her head had been all
right.
After a few days she relapsed into a duller state again,
but then got quite free and natural in her behavior. On
August 28 she gave a _retrospective_ account of her
psychosis, a part of which has been embodied in the
history. She had insight in so far as she knew she had been
mentally ill. She claimed to remember the Observation
Pavilion and her coming to the hospital, also the incidents
during the manic state, when she heard cannon and thought a
war was on, and voices she could not recognize nor
understand. Then she became stupid, although neither sad
nor happy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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