Related Research Articles
Catatonia is a complex neuropsychiatric behavioral syndrome that is characterized by abnormal movements, immobility, abnormal behaviors, and withdrawal. The onset of catatonia can be acute or subtle and symptoms can wax, wane, or change during episodes. It has historically been related to schizophrenia, but catatonia is most often seen in mood disorders. It is now known that catatonic symptoms are nonspecific and may be observed in other mental, neurological, and medical conditions. Catatonia is now a stand-alone diagnosis, and the term is used to describe a feature of the underlying disorder.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or electroshock therapy (EST) is a psychiatric treatment where a generalized seizure is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders. Typically, 70 to 120 volts are applied externally to the patient's head, resulting in approximately 800 milliamperes of direct current passing between the electrodes, for a duration of 100 milliseconds to 6 seconds, either from temple to temple or from front to back of one side of the head. However, only about 1% of the electrical current crosses the bony skull into the brain because skull impedance is about 100 times higher than skin impedance.
Ugo Cerletti was an Italian neurologist who discovered the method of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) used in psychiatry. Electroconvulsive therapy is a therapy in which electric current is used to provoke a seizure for a short duration. This therapy is used in an attempt to treat certain mental disorders, and may be useful when other possible treatments have not, or cannot, cure the person of their mental disorder.
Manfred Joshua Sakel was an Austrian-Jewish neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.
Ladislas Joseph Meduna was a Hungarian neuropathologist and neuropsychiatrist who initiated convulsive treatment, the repeated induction of grand mal seizures, as a treatment of psychosis. Observing the high concentration of glia in post-mortem brains of patients with epilepsy and a paucity in those with schizophrenia, he proposed that schizophrenia might be treated by inducing "epileptic" seizures. Thus, chemically induced seizures became the electroconvulsive therapy that is now in worldwide use.
Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and COVID-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.
Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. It was introduced in 1927 by Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favour and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs in the 1960s.
Waxy flexibility is one of the twelve symptoms that can lead to the diagnosis of catatonia. It is a psychomotor symptom that results in a decreased response to stimuli and a tendency to remain in an immobile posture. If one were to move the arm of someone with waxy flexibility, the patient would keep that arm where it had been positioned until moved again as if positioning malleable wax. Attempts to reposition the patient are met by "slight, even resistance".
Electroconvulsive therapy is a controversial psychiatric treatment in which seizures are induced with electricity. ECT was first used in the United Kingdom in 1939 and, although its use has been declining for several decades, it was still given to about 11,000 people a year in the early 2000s.
Harold A. Sackeim is an American psychologist and electroconvulsive therapy researcher. He has been Chief of the Department of Biological Psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute and Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry and Radiology at Columbia University. He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia in 1972; in 1974, he received his master's degree from Oxford University; and in 1977 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Abram Elting Bennett (1898–1985) was an American psychiatrist best known for his work on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Flurothyl (Indoklon) is a volatile liquid drug from the halogenated ether family, related to inhaled anaesthetic agents such as diethyl ether, but having the opposite effects, acting as a stimulant and convulsant. A clear and stable liquid, it has a mild ethereal odor whose vapors are non-flammable. It is excreted from the body by the lungs in an unchanged state.
Linda Andre was an American psychiatric survivor activist and writer, living in New York City, who was the director of the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry (CTIP), an organization founded by Marilyn Rice in 1984 to encourage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) machines.
Leonard Roy Frank was an American human rights activist, psychiatric survivor, editor, writer, aphorist, and lecturer.
Ted Chabasinski is an American psychiatric survivor, human rights activist and attorney who lives in Berkeley, California. At the age of six, he was taken from his foster family's home and committed to a New York psychiatric facility. Diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, he underwent intensive electroshock therapy and remained an inmate in a state psychiatric hospital until the age of seventeen. He subsequently trained as a lawyer and became active in the psychiatric survivors movement. In 1982, he was a leader in an initially successful campaign seeking to ban the use of electroshock in Berkeley, California.
William Jefferson Bleckwenn was an American neurologist, psychiatrist, and military physician, who was instrumental in developing the treatment known as "narcoanalysis" or "narcosynthesis", also known by the lay term "truth serum".
Sarah H. Lisanby is an American psychiatrist who studies the use of neurostimulation devices to treat mental illness. Since 2015 she has directed the division of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) working on translational research.
David John Impastato was an American neuropsychiatrist who pioneered the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in the United States. A treatment for mental illness initially called "electroshock," ECT was developed in 1937 by Dr. Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, working in Rome. Impastato has been credited with the earliest documented use of the revolutionary method in North America, administered in early 1940 to a schizophrenic female patient in New York City. Soon after, he and colleague Dr. Renato Almansi completed the first case study of ECT to appear in a U.S. publication. Impastato spent the next four decades refining the technique, gaining recognition as one of its most authoritative spokesmen. He taught, lectured widely and published over fifty articles on his work. He called on ECT practitioners to observe the strictest protocols of patient safety, countered resistance to ECT from both the medical and cultural establishments, and met later challenges to electroconvulsive therapy from developments in psychopharmacology. Impastato would live to see ECT recommended by the American Psychiatric Association for a distinct core of intractable mental disorders. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration took longer to respond to the treatment's potential. But in 2016 the FDA drafted guidelines for ECT similar to those of the APA, as well as proposing regulations for treatment with Class II and Class III devices. Though still not free of controversy, electroconvulsive therapy is the treatment of choice for an estimated 100,000 patients a year in the United States.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is the science of recording the spontaneous rhythmic electrical activity of a living brain through electrodes on the scalp. Brain rhythms have origins similar to the electrical activity of the heart. The rhythmic activity varies in frequency and amplitude with age, attention, sleep, and chemical concentrations of oxygen, carbon dioxide, glucose, ammonia, and hormones. Chemicals that affect brain functions change brain rhythms in systematic and identifiable ways. As new psychoactive drugs were discovered that changed behavior, the basis for the science of psychopharmacology, the accompanying changes in the rhythms were found to be drug class specific. The measurement of the changes in rhythms became the basis for the science of pharmaco-EEG.
Autistic catatonia is a term used to describe the occurrence of catatonia in autistic people. Catatonia occurs in roughly 10 percent of people diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. In addition to the common sign of catatonia, autistic people with catatonia are more likely to stim and self-harm.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 P Munk-Jorgensen 2005 Biography: Max Fink, MD. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 112: 325.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 A Kaplan 2005 Through the Times with Max Fink, M.D. Psychiatric Times.22, September.
- 1 2 http://medicine.stonybrookmedicine.edu/psychiatry/faculty/fink_m. Archived 2014-05-14 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ M Fink 1958 Effect of anticholinergic agent, diethazine on EEG and behaviour: significance for theory of convulsive therapy. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry80: 380-387.
- ↑ M Fink 1986 Convulsive therapy and epilepsy research. In MR Trimble and EH Reynolds (eds.) What is epilepsy? Churchill Livingstone, 217-228.
- ↑ M Fink 2006 The Camelford Hysteria: a lesson for ECT? Psychiatric Times23, October.
- ↑ M Fink 2013 Rediscovering catatonia: the biography of a treatable syndrome. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica127, Issue supplement s441, 1-47.
- ↑ "The Thomas W. Salmon Award and Lecture | New York Academy of Medicine". www.nyam.org. Retrieved 2021-01-11.
- ↑ "Legendary Physician Wins Institute of Living Burlingame Award | Hartford HealthCare". hartfordhealthcare.org. Retrieved 2021-01-11.
- ↑ Kellner CH, Fink M, et al.: Continuation ECT versus pharmacotherapy for relapse prevention in major depression: a multi-site study from CORE. Archives General Psychiatry 2006; 63:1337-44
- ↑ DFCM Research Program - research grants July 2002 to June 2005 Archived 2007-04-15 at the Wayback Machine .
- ↑ E Shorter and D Healy 2007 Shock Therapy: a history of electroconvulsive treatment in mental illness. Rutgers University Press.
