Personal experience of lifelong illness

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Green
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Insulin Coma ◽  
Insulin Coma Therapy

The author describes his experience of mental illness since the age of 13. He was admitted to the local psychiatric hospital, where his treatment included time in a padded cell, insulin coma therapy, and a leucotomy. He describes his long admission, and other aspects of his life – his marriage and employment, as well as the experience of stigma related to his illness. He reflects on what helps him to cope and how he has managed his life despite all the tribulations.

Irreversible Hypoglycaemic Coma in Islet-Cell Adenoma and in Schizophrenia

1955 ◽  
Vol 101 (424) ◽  
pp. 673-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. N. Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Islet Cell ◽  
Severe Hypoglycaemia ◽  
Insulin Dosage ◽  
Cell Adenoma ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Schizophrenic Patients ◽  
Insulin Coma ◽  
Trained Staff ◽  
Hypoglycaemic Coma

As an approach to the problem of schizophrenia it is proposed to compare the effects and after-effects of severe hypoglycaemia due mainly to islet-cell adenoma of the pancreas in otherwise healthy people with the effects and after-effects of severe hypoglycaemia therapeutically induced in schizophrenics.The difficulties are plain. Personal experience of patients with functioning islet-cell adenoma is limited almost always to a few cases, whereas average experience of insulin coma treatment covers some hundreds of cases; moreover, there is little overlap of experience except in the post-mortem room or in the laboratory for morbid histology. During insulin treatment there is constant supervision by a trained staff, medical and nursing, so that serious developments can be met by immediate intravenous sugar and investigations are continual; with adenomata there is no observation until, perhaps, a general practitioner is called in about alarming symptoms of one kind or another and sometimes months or even years elapse before a patient gets into hospital, where the intensity of observation and even more so of investigation may exceed that available in mental hospitals. Insulin coma treatment has a more or less standard aim, to produce coma of increasing duration up to a maximum of something like an hour which is then repeated thirty times or more; dosage is built up with the greatest care. Adenomata produce conditions varying from the hardly serious to the fatal under the influence of an insulin dosage which is quite unknown.This comparison is based chiefly on an analysis of 290 serial courses of insulin coma treatment given to schizophrenic patients at Holloway Sanatorium during the four years 1950 to 1953 inclusive, and on the 258 cases of islet-cell adenoma reported by Crain and Thorn (1949) and the 398 cases, all that could be traced up to that date and including the Crain and Thorn cases, analysed by Howard, Moss and Rhoads (1950). Many separate papers have been consulted for more detailed approaches and for extra information, although of course those published before 1950 were included in the reviews already mentioned. Despite the difficulties of this comparison, it can be shown that the similarities between the two groups follow expectation and are very strong indeed, so that the differences which emerge have at least possible significance.

scholarly journals Insulin coma therapy: let's be factual

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 308-308
Author(s):  
Harold Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Insulin Coma ◽  
Insulin Coma Therapy

scholarly journals Attitudes of patients with severe mental illness towards COVID-19 vaccinations: A preliminary report from a public psychiatric hospital

2021 ◽  
Vol 143 ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Renana Danenberg ◽  
Sharon Shemesh ◽  
Dana Tzur Bitan ◽  
Hagai Maoz ◽  
Talia Saker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Severe Mental Illness ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
Preliminary Report

Medical Aspects of Management Problems in Maximum Security Prisons

1979 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
P. J. Pope ◽  
T. C. N. Gibbens
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personality Disorder ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
Psychiatric Treatment ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Psychopathic Personality ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
Maximum Security ◽  
Management Problems

Much has been written, especially recently, about the difficulties presented in prisons by the inclusion of mentally disordered or even psychotic offenders who would be more appropriately placed in mental hospitals. This study, carried out in 4 maximum security prisons during 1972–3, concludes that such men do not constitute any more than their fair share of all those who are seen as either disruptive or presenting management problems, probably less. Altogether a fifth of those men identified by prison staff as management problems had had some kind of psychiatric treatment before the sentence began, 4.4 per cent showed evidence of overt mental illness during it and 45 per cent were labelled as having either a psychopathic personality or a personality disorder of some kind. The great majority (85 per cent) of those presenting management problems spent the bulk of their sentences in the general wings of the four prisons and only a handful were felt to be better located in a psychiatric hospital.

scholarly journals Admission profile: towards community based services

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 336-337
Author(s):  
R. S. Augustine ◽  
P. N. Kurian ◽  
A. Michael
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
General Practitioners ◽  
Psychiatric Care ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Mentally Handicapped ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Special Groups ◽  
First Contact ◽  
Community Based Services

This audit examined 65 consecutive admissions to a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands over six months. The admissions came from a defined sector with a total population of 39,000. In the year prior to the study major changes in the delivery of psychiatric care in the sector were instituted. These changes included the introduction of admission guidelines and extra resources in the community. The general practitioners who see mental illness at first contact were informed of these changes. Attempts were made by the sector psychiatrist team to screen for appropriateness of admission with regard to the special groups such as alcoholics, the aged and the mentally handicapped.

Studies on the Physiology of Awareness: An Oximetric Investigation of the Anoxaemia Accompanying Insulin Coma Therapy

1952 ◽  
Vol 98 (412) ◽  
pp. 411-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Lovett Doust ◽  
Robert A. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Symptoms ◽  
Venous Blood ◽  
Insulin Injection ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Blood Oxygen Saturation ◽  
The Real ◽  
Arterial Blood ◽  
Schizophrenic Patients ◽  
Insulin Coma ◽  
Insulin Coma Therapy

This investigation deals with the measurement, by a peripheral method of discontinuous spectroscopic oximetry, of the arterial blood oxygen saturation levels in a group of schizophrenic patients undergoing insulin coma therapy.The association between tissue anoxia and insulin hypoglycaemia was first established by Campbell and Dudley in 1924. Dameshek and Meyerson (1935), using the arterio-venous oxygen difference method with the internal jugular vein as the source of venous blood, showed that the injection of insulin in coma doses was accompanied by an anoxaemia in the schizophrenic patients they studied. This work was confirmed by Himwich, Bowmanet al.(1939), and in another paper Himwich (1951, p. 277) and his co-workers found that the correlation of progressively developing clinical symptoms with the decrease of cerebral oxygen uptake was a closer one than the correlation with the more acute fall in the blood-sugar curve. An important symptomatic aspect of insulin hypoglycaemia includes the progressive changes in the levels of consciousness accompanying the approach towards coma. Wilder (1943) has outlined some of these changes, and Frostig (1940) and Himwich (1951, pp. 258-265) have delineated these awareness thresholds and discussed their relationship to the Hughlings Jackson theory of the phyletic organization of the central nervous system. Thus, during thefirst hourfollowing insulin injection, somnolence and lassitude appear to be associated with suppression of cortical and cerebellar activity; in thesecond hourfurther clouding of consciousness, sometimes with excitement, perceptual disturbances, periods of confusion, exacerbations of previously existing hallucinations and latent psychotic syndromes are seen; in thethird hourmotor restlessness and loss of consciousness suggest the release of basal ganglia and hypothalamus; in thefourth hourdeepening stupor and depression of exteroceptive sensitivity indicate a probable release of the midbrain and suppression of pyramidal function; in thefifth hourthe deep pre-mortal coma presages medullary release. Similarly, it is with awareness changes that many workers prefer to diagnose the “real coma” level in a patient under treatment. Thus Sakel (1937) held that coma was to be diagnosed when no further personal contact with the patient was possible, and Kalinowsky and Hoch (1946) agree that the real coma level is reached when it is completely impossible to awaken the patient.

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