Unsoundness of mind / by T.S. Clouston.

  • Thomas Clouston
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Unsoundness of mind / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    192/440 page 154
    put to bed and subjected to massage and the Weir- Mitchell treatment with most hurtful effects. They began the treatment depressed neurasthenics, they ended it suicidal melancholics. In regard to travel, do not send the patient to exciting, rapid travel in any case. In regard to fresh air, we cannot have too much of it for our melancholics ; they should, when put to bed, be in the fresh air or partly so. They need it as much as many consumptives, and it often does them as much good. In the most up-to-date mental hospitals now the newly-admitted patients are largely treated in shelters out of doors, just as if they suffered from phthisis. As to how depression ends, about 8o per cent, recover, if we take into account both the lesser and the graver varieties. If we take only the cases so severe as to have been sent to mental hospitals, about 54 per cent, recover. The younger cases on the whole have a better chance than the older. Those with fixed delusions, hallucina- tions, irritations of the skin, convulsions, very prolonged suicidal tendencies associated with delusions, and those with persistent refusal of food, are the worst cases, and are not so apt to recover. But never give up hope of a patient's recovery so long as depression persists. I have known such cases recover after twenty years. Slight conditions of mental depression usually precede, for periods more or less short, all other forms of un- soundness. Patients whose disease turns out to be mania or general paralysis very commonly have a short initial stage of depression.
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