IST -
Insulin Shock Treatment (Wiki)
Also
referred to as Insulin Coma Therapy (ICT)
Also referred to as Insulin Shock Therapy
(IST)
I don't think that this is even legal any more. Massive amounts of
insulin are injected into the
patient, causing convulsions and coma. After an hour, the
patient is revived with an injection of warm saline solution via a stomach tube or by intravenously injecting the patient with glucose; sadly, sometimes the
coma does not end; happily, such an
occurrence is rare. It was considered to be an
effective treatment for all sorts of psychiatric ailment and was discovered in 1933;
interestingly, the treatment seemed to have an apparently higher
success rate in schizophrenia where the patient in question had suffered from
the illness for less than two years, sometimes
prompting a "spontaneous recovery". Epileptic seizures typically occured only 45-100 minutes
into the the procedure. However, IST is now considered to have little
beneficial effect beyond shock or placæbo effect and as such is viewed as a
cruel practice.
With regards to side effects, IST is hampered with several serious
possible problems. As was stated earlier,
comatose states could reach an excessive intensity,
prompting to the procedure being abandoned quickly. In
order to limit the chances of this happening,
vital signs are monitored throughout the
procedure. Sometimes the induced coma persists, a very serious complication.
Other problems include Anoxia, Hypertonia, Vascular Shock and, in more minor cases,
selective paralysis, Aphasia and confusion.
"With insulin-shock treatment, the
patient is given increasingly large doses of insulin, which
reduce the sugar content of the blood and bring on a state
of coma. Usually the comatose condition is allowed to
persist for about an hour, at which time it is terminated
by administering warm salt solution via stomach tube or by
intravenous injection of glucose. Insulin shock had its
greatest effectiveness with schizophrenic patients whose
illness had lasted less than two years (the rate of
spontaneous recovery from schizophrenia also is highest in
the first two years of the illness). Insulin-shock therapy
also had more value in the treatment of paranoid and
catatonic schizophrenia than in the hebephrenic types."
- Encyclopædia Britannica