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
The patient after recovery gave the following version of
the onset: She had a position on 99th St. for 2½ years.
She liked the people there and often went to see them
later. Her next position was in the Bronx. She was there
for nine months. In the same house lived “Harry.” After the
work she used to talk to him in the yard and, after she
left, she used to think of him and long for him. But she
denied, with a very natural attitude, that she worried
about him at the beginning of her psychosis. After the
position in the Bronx she went to one on 96th St., where
she was for four months. In the same house was a girl whom
she liked and who was lively. When she left, the patient
left too. This was a month before the psychosis began. When
she left there, she got word that her employer on 99th St.
had developed consumption and had to go out West, but did
not worry over this news, she claimed. She looked for
another position and had one for two weeks, but felt
lonely, did not care to live. Then her sister took her to
her home. She thought people were looking at her and were
making remarks because she was not working. During this
time she had a dream one night in which her dead mother
appeared to her (in ordinary street clothes) and said to
her that she (the patient) “was going away.” She woke up
frightened. She was worried, thought she had not prayed
enough for her mother, and asked her sister to pray also
and to give money to the poor. She did not recall, or at
any rate denied, speaking of the young man suing her.
She was then taken to a _private sanatorium_, where she was
for two months preceding her admission to this hospital.
There she was described as quiet, mute, tube-fed,
resistive.
When well, the patient said that in this sanatorium she was
first spoon-fed, cup-fed, later tube-fed, “I used to be
scared of them, they used to put a spoon way down my throat
and I had no appetite--I did not like them around me, they
were mean to me. They used to let me stand without clothes,
used to spite me.” “If I did not want to dress myself, they
used to hit me.” “I used to feel lonesome for home and I
imagined my people were there and that my sister passed the
place without stopping.” She was afraid of the nurses,
thinking they wanted to kill her.
At the _Observation Pavilion_ the patient was described as
dull, but brightening up under examination. She made few
spontaneous remarks, but in answer to questions said she
was melancholy, tired of life, because she was in love with
a Gentile fellow who refused to marry her. She also said “I
get peculiar thoughts that I am going to die.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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