What Is Insulin Coma Therapy?

Andrew Scull says insulin coma therapy put people with schizophrenia into comas with extra insulin. A doctor at a German clinic for drug addicts had used mild comas to ease withdrawal. After he moved to Austria, he tried the same idea on schizophrenia, starting in 1933. People were put into comas that could last hours or days, then revived with glucose, usually given intravenously. Seizures during the coma were taken as a good sign. He claimed the treatment cured 80 percent of his patients, a percentage that keeps showing up in these cure stories.

The method spread after a demonstration at Harlem Valley Mental Hospital in New York. The American visit was in 1936. It never became a large-scale treatment, because patients hovered on the brink of life and death and needed constant nursing. A permanent coma or death was possible. Told that the comas killed brain cells, the doctor said they were probably killing the schizophrenic brain cells. Scull calls that nonsense. A controlled trial in the 1950s failed, and the treatment died out. John Nash received it at Trenton State Hospital. Doctors there were going to lobotomize him and did not. A course could run to 60 comas. The mortality rate was 1 to 5 percent, and it caused significant brain damage and obesity, yet it was hailed as a miracle cure for schizophrenia.