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Show Keie.isL-d by Western Newspaper Uniun. BEHAVIOR TREATMENT One of the difficulties about the trcatmei of behavior symptoms by the use of insulin or metrazol is that some patients who have undergone this method, or have I spoken to patients who have done so, are somewhat afraid of it, notwithstanding notwithstand-ing that they have experienced or observed ob-served its helpful results. re-sults. It is for this and other reasons that many physicians physi-cians are now using the electrically In- Dr. Barton duccd convulsions in cases where the mental symptoms are not due to any true or organic disease of the brain. I have spoken twice before about this method and in the Illinois Medical Medi-cal Journal, Dr. J. V. Edlin, Chicago, Chi-cago, reports the use of electric shock treatment in 126 cases. The length of time the patients suffered with their symptoms ranged from less than six months to 10 years, and included all the functional psychoses such as anxieties, fears, dream states and melancholia. Of the patients who were ill for less than six months, about 53 per cent recovered; the rate for those ill from six months to one year was about 31 per cent; for those ill from one to five years it was 21 per cent, and for those ill from 6 to 10 years it was 20 per cent. The best results were obtained by patients suffering from involutional involu-tional melancholia (depressed feeling feel-ing of middle and old age). The next best occurred in patients with catatonia cata-tonia (where dream state passes into melancholia) and then those with hebephrenia (silliness which comes on at puberty) and dementia precox pre-cox combined with hebephrenic and catatonic features.. Dr. Edlin found that just as with insulin and metrazol the symptoms before receiving electric shock treatment treat-ment determined the chances of his recovery; the shorter the time, the better the chances. Dr. Edlin prefers pre-fers electrical to metrazol treatment because of the high percentage of recoveries re-coveries and the almost total absence ab-sence of fear. He also advises that the usual treatment of mental cases by questioning the patient and explaining ex-plaining the causes of the symptoms f : should be used in addition to the electric shock treatment. |