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Missed Opportunities? Beneficial Uses of Illicit Drugs
Published in Ross Coomber, The Control of Drugs and Drug Users, 2020
Lester Grinspoon, James B. Bakalar
It would be wrong to conclude that a psychedelic experience can never be a turning point in the life of an alcoholic. As William James said, “Religiomania is the best cure for dipsomania.” Unfortunately, psychedelic experiences have the same limitations as religious conversions. Their authenticity and emotional power are not guarantees against backsliding when the old frustrations, constraints, and emotional distress have to be faced in everyday life. Even when the revelation does seem to have lasting effects, it might have been merely a symptom of readiness to change rather than a cause of change.
Psychodynamics
Published in Albert A. Kurland, S. Joseph Mulé, Psychiatric Aspects of Opiate Dependence, 2019
Albert A. Kurland, S. Joseph Mulé
In tracing out Freud’s impressions of addiction, Yorke55 begins with the letter to Fliess61 in 1897. In these letters, Freud expressed the opinion that dipsomania, the impulse to drink, was a substitution for an associated sexual impulse and that gambling might have a similar basis. In another letter that same year, Freud emphasized the link between addiction and masturbation: “Masturbation [could be termed] the ‘primal addiction.’ [It] is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addiction – for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. – came into existence.” Freud also expressed doubts whether an addiction of this kind is curable. The following year (1898), writing on “The Sexual Aetiology of the Neuroses,” Freud12 refers to the treatments used for breaking an addiction and concludes: Their success will only be an apparent one, so long as the physician contents himself with withdrawing the narcotic substance from his patients without troubling about the source from which the imperative need for it springs. … Closer enquiry usually shows that these narcotics are meant to serve – directly or indirectly – as a substitute for a lack of sexual satisfaction; and whenever normal sexual life can no longer be re-established, we can count with certainty on the patient’s relapse.
Metaphors in psychiatry
Published in Alan Bleakley, Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine, 2017
An 1840 census in the USA attempted to record the frequency of ‘idiocy/ insanity’ across the population. By the 1880 census, seven forms of mental illness classifications were used: mania (heightened passions), melancholia (depression), monomania (obsession), paresis (hysterical paralysis), dementia (memory loss), dipsomania (alcoholism) and epilepsy. This list constituted an idiosyncratic collection of symptoms that may even indicate symptom in those who conceived the classificatory system. Up to 1921, the system was used less as a prospective psychiatric diagnostic symptom and more as a retrospective health statistic. After this date and the formation of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a system of tally (openly metaphorical) became literalized. The first edition of DSM was published in 1952. A body-without-organs became stratified. Patients could now be carefully located on a latitude and longitude grid, placed rather than dis-placed – pinned as specimens rather than remaining as floating anomalies.
William A. F. Browne: Earliest Documented Use of Rehabilitative Art in Great Britain
Published in Art Therapy, 2021
Browne was particularly interested in artwork produced by his patients and ultimately amassed a collection of 134 pieces by his own patients and those from surrounding hospitals (Anonymous, 1880; Nurse, 2016). These artworks were the focus of an exhibit in Scotland entitled Art in the Asylum (Tischler, 2013). Figure 1 is a watercolor painting on paper (17.2 × 25.4 cm) created by an individual in treatment for a severe alcohol use disorder (formerly termed dipsomaniac). It is an imaginative and innovative work that can be viewed as presented or upside-down. The flower in Figure 2, also a watercolor painting on paper (12.9 × 13.8 cm) is one of seven floral illustration created by Joanna Hutton. The pencil drawing in Figure 3 (17.5 × 26.6 cm) was completed by an unknown patient but is a copy of a woodcut print which appeared in The Saturday Magazine in 1839 at the opening of Crichton Royal Institution.
Valentin Magnan and Sergey Korsakov: French and Russian pioneers in the study of alcohol abuse
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2018
Magnan was an adherent of Bénédict Morel’s (1809–1873) degeneration theory of psychiatric disorders, rather popular in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He believed that the paroxysm of drinking, so characteristic for dipsomaniacs, was an indication of a hereditary mental disorder. Magnan claimed that, if all complications of alcoholism were taken into account, alcoholism would be responsible for at least 50% of mental patients in Paris (Prestwich, 1997). Furthermore, he argued that the main difference between the effects of absinthe from those of alcohol is the manifestly epileptic attack, the early onset of the delirium, and the complete loss of memory (Sournia, 1986). Although absinthism was a variety peculiar to France, the elements of French typologies of alcoholism were influential in other countries, especially the neurological hereditary theory of Magnan. Gradually, Magnan formed a scientific school that was recognized not only in France but also abroad (Dowbiggin, 1996).