Mental patients

On managing the stigma of mental illness, see S. Onken and E. Slaten, Disability Identity Formation and Affirmation The Experiences of Persons with Severe Mental Illness, Sociolo cal Practice 2 (June 2000) 99-111 E. Wright, W. Gronfein, and T. Owens, Deinstitutionalization, Social Rejection, and the Self-Esteem of Former Mental Patients, of Health and Social Behavior 41 (March 2000) 68-90. 

T. Szasz, Ideology and Insanity (Garden City, N.Y. Anchot Books, 1970) R. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York Ballantine Books, 1967) E. Goffman, Asylums Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y Doubleday Anchot, 1961). 

Brakel J, Davis JM. Taking harms seriously involuntary mental patients and the right to refuse treatment, ind L Rev 1991 25 429-473. 

Statistically, the incidence of sudden death in mental patients has not increased since the introduction of antipsychotics, and no one type is more implicated, with deaths occurring on high- and low-potency agents. Medical examiners should refrain from attributing sudden death to these drugs, or to any other cause for that matter, until research clearly establishes a causal rather than coincidental link. 

Paul GL, Lentz RJ. Psychosocial treatment of chronic mental patients milieu vs. social learning programs. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1977. 

Paul GL, Tobias LL, Holly, BL. Maintenance psychotropic drugs in the presence of active treatment programs a triple-blind withdrawal study with long-term mental patients. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1972 27 106-115. 

The advent of antipsychotic drugs represents one of the most significant developments in the treatment of schizophrenia and similar disorders. These drugs are believed to be the single most important reason for the abrupt decrease in the number of mental patients admitted to public hospitals during the 1950s and 1960s.22 This observation does not imply that these... 

Many researchers have studied the relationship between marijuana and mental illness. Early twentieth century proponents of marijuana prohibition in the United States often cited studies showing a link between marijuana and insanity and referred to reports of large numbers of institutionalized mental patients in India and Egypt who had used marijuana. However, since the 1970s, researchers have effectively refuted the claims of a direct link between marijuana use and mental illness. 

Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York Doubleday Anchor. 

In addition to known antidepressants increasing endogenous opioids, opioid ligands have also been administered to depressed patients to determine if opioid compounds have clinical efficacy to treat depression. The opioid ligand cyclazocine improved symptoms in severely depressed, chronically ill mental patients in an open clinical trial and in clinical trials with patients unresponsive to the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine [16]. Intravenous (5-endorphin infusions improved mood in depressed patients in open case studies [17] and in depressed patients in a double-blind placebo-controlled study [18,19]. However, one study found a trend to improve depression scores in patients after acute and chronic (5-endorphin infusions, but it was not significant [20]. 

Excretion of follicle-stimulating hormone in urine of mental patients in and past menopause. Proc. Soc. Exptl. Biol. Med., 32, 1576 (1935). With M. M. Harris, E. Brand, and L. E. Hinsie. 

As a result of psychiatric and psychological experiments, many mental patients and volunteers (an example of the latter is the novelist Ken Kesey) were exposed to the effects of LSD and other psychedelics. Sandoz deserves most of the credit for this, because it distributed LSD and psilocybin to licensed researchers all over the world, mostly free of charge. This was done with hopes that a researcher somewhere would find a medical use for these novel compounds. 

Until the time research with LSD was dramatically curbed in 1966 more than 40,000 mental patients had received it in dosages running from 20 meg. to upwards of 2,500 meg. It was administered privately in some instances, and in others it was given to whole hospital wards. Some people received only one dose others had as many as 120. In most instances, LSD was used in small amounts as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Other patients took it as a one-time, high-dosage treatment. 

So far, most of the successful reports on the treatment of mental patients with LSD deal with neurotic patients who have been motivated to get well. There seems to be tacit agreement among therapists that LSD is not effective in dealing with psychoses. Practitioners who have undertaken LSD treatment of schizophrenics have been regarded as brave or reckless. (Schizophrenia is a term so vague that even the American Psychological Association has eliminated it from their list of disorders.)... 

Because mescaline lodges for the most part in the liver, some concern has been expressed about its use by those with liver ailments. It is worth noting that during the 1950s and 1960s this drug was given to a number of alcoholic mental patients, many of whom had severely diseased livers, with little untoward effect. 

If these drugs were not being prescribed to so-called mental patients, and especially to those labeled as schizophrenic, the findings on metabolic syndrome would probably lead the FDA to withdraw them from the market. 

Publishing more than four decades ago, my 1964 study Coercion of Voluntary Patients in an Open Hospital remains the only peer-reviewed scientific article that systematically investigated the various threats and outright forms of coercion used to control mental patients, including drugs, electroshock, and commitment. 

There is a particular irony in the date of the first publication on the use of lithium in mental patients Cade s article appeared in 1949, the same year that Corcoran et al. published Lithium Poisoning From the Use of Salt Substitutes in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

Get to know the person as a fully developed human being, not narrowly as a mental patient. 

Goldner (19) reported chat he had used Intramuscular doses of 5-50 mg of scopolamine In treating beneficially an unspecified number of mental patients, but then had switched to atropine because of its greater availability. Be reported on a group of 20 patients treated with atropine-toxicity therapy, 13 (65Z) of whom were considered to have benefited moderately or markedly. Goldner also gave a limited comparison of the results of electroconvulsive therapy (EOT) and of atropine-toxicity therapy, stating chat several patients who had not benefited from ECT improved on substitution of atropine-induced coma. 

Since the 1950s, the psychiatric community has had the benefit of antimanic and antidepressant medications to treat manic-depressive illnesses. These medications were developed using the work of Emil Kraepelin, a German physician who wrote about mental illness in the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Kraepelin had carefully noted distinguishing symptoms among mental patients and had followed the course of the various illnesses in many of them. He was the first to distinguish what he called dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, and was able to differentiate this illness from manic depression. 

What makes a person like Hinckley disabled His ability to shoot others, a premeditated crime that we interpret as a disability due to a disease. Disability produced by deviant ability is as different from disability due to physical limitation as mental illness is different from bodily illness. The bizarre act of a so-called mental patient, whether murder or self-mutilation, is a complex performance, an ability most people lack. In contrast, the disability of a physically sick person, such as blindness or paralysis, is the absence of an innate sensory or motor ability, not the lack of a social skill or the rejection of responsibility. Attributing adult dependency to disabling disease is as fallacious and misguided as is attributing crime to mental illness. 

Most people disabled by physical illnesses are rehabilitated and removed from the disability rolls, whereas most people disabled by mental illnesses are not rehabilitated and remain on the rolls for long periods. Disability bureaucrats regard this discrepancy as a frustrating problem. I regard it as evidence that mental patients do not have diseases instead, they occupy a social role, officially interpreted as due to a chronic illness and hence an entitlement for ac-... 

The typical mental patient is considered dangerous to himself or others, has no home of his own, and is unemployed. Although he has no true disease, he is called ill to justify classifying him as entitled to disability benefits. 

It is hardly surprising, then, that most disabled mental patients cannot be rehabilitated and that the number of such patients is steadily increasing. Stone is baffled There has been a decrease in the rate oftermination of disability pensions, either by death or by recovery. The meaning of this trend is unclear. It is unclear only if we view mental illness as a true illness. It is clear if we view mental illness as a medical-legal fiction, created, in part, to enable adult dependents to qualify as disabled-by-disease that understanding also dispels the mystery about the nonlethality of the disease and the patient s failure to recover from it. 

Because health professionals believe in the reality of mental illnesses, they overlook the fact that as the number of mental patients incarcerated in mental hospitals decreased after the 1960s, the numbers of persons receiving disability for mental illness increased. Before the 1960s, most mental patients resided in mental hospitals and were supported by the state with room and board, much as children are supported by parents. (Prior to World War II, virtually all mental patients were hospitalized involuntarily, and only such patients were considered genuinely or seriously mentally ill.) Today, persons who want to enter a mental hospital are usually denied admission, and those hospitalized involuntarily are quickly discharged and given disability payments. 

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