Fake Shock Spoils "A B-Mind"

[HornEd]

"A Beautiful Mind" surfaced in my DVD collection yesterday... and it had not been opened. Ron Howard usually does great work... especially in the area of realism and authenticity. About the time that the reak person the story is about was on "Insulin Shock Therapy"... I was part of the last Insulin Therapy neuropsychiatric team in the U.S. Army's Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco.

While the movie had overall excellence and deserved its four Academy Awards, it was clear that either no one knew how Insulin Shock Therapy works... or they just wanted to hype up the film with the star doing a dance on the bed that never happened in real life. Insulin Shock Therapy is very dangerous and was used on only the most severely ill patients. The patient is delibertly overdosed on insulin to create a diabetic coma. The patients reflexes are tested and, just short of irreverseable hypoglycemia, a massive glucose IV is started to prevent the patient's premature death.

While the patient may writhe around a bit when going into a coma state... there is no involuntary jumping about like that shown in the movie or like what occurs in Electro Shock Therapy where an electric "storm" is created in the patient's brain by a pair of electrodes on his forehead. Essentially, after the "storm" the brain has to recheck its circuits and sometimes things get connected up better than they were... and sometimes they are worse. Even in those days, a drug to minimize spasms was used to lessen the potential for broken bones.

On the second disk, there is a video of Tipper Gore giving the director, Ron Howard, an award for doing a great job with the film to promote better understanding of mental illness. And, in the main, it did... but you can bet that Tipper Gore never saw anyone go through Insulin Shock Therapy!

That is not to say that watching someone go through Insulin Therapy is not a spooky and dangerous trip. It is true that patients are put into arm and leg restraints so they won't hurt themselves or their medical team. The spooky part is that most patients seem to regress from their adult state, to a child state, then to a gurgling or crying infant... and then, generally in a fetal position, patients often begin to grunt like primal apes.

Generally, each patient must be frequently checked for vital signs and appropriately negative neural responses. When the big toe goes up and all the other toes bend down in response to a metal probe run across the patient's arch of the foot... it's time to get the glucose into his veins and reverse the dying process.

Padded tongue depressors are used in Electro Shock Therapy... but not in Insulin Therapy where the "shock" to the system is artificially induced starvation on a cellular level and not an electric shock. Frankly, I have met very few psychiatrists and psychologists that have actually witnessed, let alone participate in the process. While it is a very dangerous procedure, and one that can trigger dangerous responses for many hours after the treatment... there are no padded tongue depressors and no nasal gastric tube to feed the patient as shown in the film... and the procedure to administer insulin was also less than accurate.

But let's face it... the procedure is so rare that few would ever know that they had been shown a bit of nonsense in an otherwise well done film. But, at least you Forum Folk know the truth from someone who had his hand on the needle... for as many as twenty patients at a time. When the grunting began, it sounded like Spring Fever in the Ape Grotto at the local zoo. -HornED