Word: dementias
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...defects; a third more of them are blind; eight times as many are colorblind; hemophilia is exclusively a male disease. Although women have a 20% higher illness rate in almost every disease, men have a much higher death rate (an exception: 40% more women die during the course of dementia praecox...
...first accounts of insulin shock treatment for dementia praecox (type of insanity characterized by split personality, delusions, self-absorption, etc.) seemed to make the old miracle of casting out devils come true (TIME, Jan. 25, 1937).* Last week New York State's hard-headed Temporary Commission on State Hospital Problems, whose job it is to find ways of reducing the enormous state hospital population (73,000), ignored the miracle angle, produced the first report on what insulin can mean in days & months, dollars & cents. It recommended to Governor Dewey that, if only for economy's sake, insulin shock...
...insulin saved the hospital 286,695 patient days, over $80,000 worth of food & clothing, and an undetermined amount in building maintenance and new construction. Possible future savings in money and heartache are enormous : though only one quarter of the mental cases admitted to New York State hospitals are dementia praecox cases, the disease bedevils its victims so long, sometimes ending in hopeless deterioration, that such cases comprise 50 to 60% of the hospitalized mental patients. There are some 250,000 in U.S. hospitals...
...certain whether insulin shock brings about more ultimate remissions of dementia praecox (psychiatrists never speak of cures) than would occur anyhow. All that is certain is that it cuts the average hospital stay. And no one yet knows just how any kind of shock therapy works: some think results come from temporarily depriving the brain of oxygen or of sugar, its only food; some suggest that individual attention and the short psychiatric session following each shock are really what do the trick. Otherwise, because of the psychiatrist shortage, a therapeutic psychiatric interview is a rare event in a state mental...
...State mental hospital; 3) injuries to patients should be promptly investigated; 4) new sources of attendants should be found-possibly among conscientious objectors; 5) patients who have escaped and remained at large for one year should not be automatically discharged as at present (one of Creedmoor's dementia praecox patients got a job as a Government employe in Philadelphia). He later added that patients merely senile should not be herded into institutions for the insane...