CHAPTER XIV
RELATION OF DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TO INSANITY
The habitual drug-taker and the confirmed alcoholic are puzzles that baffle the alienist. The man with the “wet brain” is a contradiction of all the rules of normality. In many criminal trials men have been adjudged insane who were merely in abnormal states due to the habitual use of drugs or alcohol, of which, without proper treatment, they have been suddenly deprived.
In one of the largest hospitals in the United States I once ran across an old woman crooning while she rocked an imaginary baby. She had been formally and legally adjudged insane by the State’s experts. As a matter of fact, she was suffering only from an hallucination due to alcoholic deprivation. I suggested definite medical treatment for this case when I discovered that she was about to be transferred from the alcoholic ward to the insane pavilion. In two days after the administration of this treatment she had lost all her hallucinations, and on the third day was dismissed from the institution. Not long ago I observed a similar case in a foreign hospital.
It is my belief that commitments for insanity in the United States might be decreased by one third if in every case where insanity was suspected, but where an alcoholic or drug history could be traced, the patient should be subjected to the necessary medical treatment before the final commitment was made. The sudden deprivation of drugs and alcohol which follows the imprisonment of alcoholics and drug-users upon disorderly or criminal charges has produced thousands of cases of apparent insanity sufficiently marked for the subjects to be placed in insane asylums. There, as in the prison, no intelligent note is made of their condition, nor is any proper treatment applied, the result being that they become really insane—insane and hopeless. If we had any means of securing accurate knowledge of the number of such incurable maniacs who are now confined in our asylums, we should find in it a startling evidence of the lack of knowledge on the part of the medical world of what deprivation means to the habitual victim of drugs or alcohol.
GENERAL IGNORANCE OF THE RELATION OF ADDICTION TO INSANITY
The necessity for educating the public in regard to the very definite relation between alcoholism and insanity should no longer be overlooked. There lies a public peril of unappreciated magnitude in the fact that mere deprivation, the only method so far followed, has been, and if it is not corrected, will continue to be, one of the principal feeders of our insane asylums. Alcoholism will lead to insanity eventually even without deprivation.
The case is somewhat different with drug victims. Ordinarily they will not become insane unless deprived of their drug, although in the final stages of the habit they are likely to become incompetent and subject to certain hallucinations, imagining the existence of plots against them, suspecting unfairness on every hand, taking easy offense, exhibiting, in fact, a general distorted mental condition. It is true, indeed, that in some instances the drug victim who is deprived of his drug may become definitely insane, but death is the more frequent result.