United States or Falkland Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Two weeks before admission her mother found her in a stupor, immovable, with her eyes closed. In 24 hours she woke up, began to sing “Rest for the Weary,” prayed, then was stuporous again for six hours. When she came out of this, she said she was “going to die,” God had told her so and talked of her own funeral arrangements.
The exhausted Fourth Army fought as though in a hideous nightmare, defended their lines in a sullen obstinacy that seemed almost stuporous, and countercharged in a blind frenzy that approached to delirium. It was doubtful if General Langle's army could hold out much longer.
We have, of course, similar experiences when we try to get stuporous patients to eat, who, after much coaxing may, for a short time, be made to feed themselves, only to relapse into the state of inactivity. Such variations are paralleled, as we shall later show, by a suddenly pronounced deepening of the thinking disorder. We have already seen that the onset may be quite sudden.
She was also more in contact with her environment than many stuporous patients are, for, not infrequently, she would look at what was going on about her. Her apathy was also broken into in a marked degree by her active resistiveness, which was sometimes accompanied by plain anger. It seems that a prospect of death may occur in other instances in a totally affectless state.
The conflict was frankly stated in the words, “I love my father but don’t want to die.” Then for two weeks she had some fever, was tube-fed, muttered about being killed or showed some elation, there being apparently interrupted stuporous, manic and, possibly, anxiety episodes. Finally she settled down to a year of deep stupor.
Since they were spoken of in the past tense, we regarded them as not belonging to the actual situation but to the more stuporous period.
When, on one occasion, asked how she felt, she, as before, said, “I feel better.” Then, with the exception of a day at the end of the month, when the more stuporous state was again in evidence, she returned to her former condition without catalepsy or resistiveness and without staring, but essentially with inactivity or slowness.
The stuporous case, on the other hand, evidences merely less and less indifference, and more and more interest in his environment and in himself as he gets well. The associated symptoms are no less dissimilar.
But this condition is temporary and the situation and appearance of the patient betrays the fact that he has just had a convulsion. Rarely, protracted stuporous states occur in epilepsy which closely resemble the conditions described in this book. In fact it is probable the true stupors may occur in epilepsy just as in dementia præcox or manic-depressive insanity.
His view is that pains tend to preserve the mutism and amnesia, so that there are “inhibitory processes” causing the stupor, which prevent the patient from further suffering. When deafness is associated with mutism, he thinks it is often due merely to the inattention of the stuporous state.
Word Of The Day