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
January 28 it is mentioned that she stated she sometimes
felt so lonely, and as though people were against her; and
on February 13 she said she felt as though the chair knew
what she was talking about. It is also mentioned in January
that she wept at times, but this seems not to have been a
leading feature at all. In March, when asked why she was
not more active and cheerful, her lips began to quiver and
she said, “Oh, I thought my children would be cut up in
Bellevue.” “I don’t know why I feel that way about them.”
She sometimes cried when her friends left her.
5. Then followed a week of a rather faultfinding,
self-assertive state, during which she demanded to be
allowed to go home, saying indignantly that she was not a
wicked woman, had done nothing to be kept a prisoner here;
she wanted justice because another patient had called her
crazy. But in this period also she said that after the
robbery (at home) she felt afraid that her honor would be
taken away. When told that her husband had been with her,
she said “Yes, but I was afraid they would get into a
fight.” (You mean you were afraid the other man would kill
him?) “No, he is not dead.” She further talked of a
disagreement she had at that time with her husband, and
that she felt then like running away and leading a bad
life, but thought of the children. With tears she added: “I
would not do anything that is wrong. I have my children to
live for.” Quite remarkable was the fact that she then told
of various erotic experiences in her life, though with a
distinctly moral attitude and minimizing them.
6. On _June 16_ another state was initiated with peculiar
ideas, the setting of which is not known, as she told them
only to the nurses. She said that she was not Mrs. W. but
the Queen of England, again that she was an actress, or
again the wife of a wealthy Mr. B., and that she was going
to have a baby. But at night she is said to have been
agitated and afraid she was to be executed. She asked to be
allowed to go to bed again, then stopped talking, and
remained in this mute condition for about a week. She often
left her bed and went back again, remained much with a
perplexed expression. On one occasion she put tinsel in her
hair saying it was a golden crown.
7. At the end of that time she became freer and more
natural, and remained so for three weeks. She occupied
herself somewhat. When asked what had happened in the
condition preceding, said she thought she was a queen or
was to be a queen.
8. Towards the end of this period she had again three more
absorbed days, but when examined on the third of these days
got rather talkative and somewhat drifting in her talk on
superficial topics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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