Ladislas Meduna: Daddy of the Great Evil Seizure “Cure”

     In the early 1930s Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna began following up on earlier psychiatric theories of a connection between epilepsy and schizophrenia, the blanket term then for mental disorder. He had observed through autopsies that patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia had fewer glia cells than the post-mortem brains of patients who had had epilepsy in life.

     His bright idea?

     Let’s induce seizures in patients with schizophrenia in hopes that that would increase the number of their glia cells and thus reduce their schizophrenia. He started off using the pesticide strychnine and the stimulants Coramine and camphor to cause grand mal seizures in the schizophrenic patients he found in a psychiatric hospital just outside of Budapest.

     Even with those toxic chemicals, though, he could only induce seizures in about a third of his patients. He needed something far stronger, far more savage.

     He had a second bright idea.

     He started using intravenous injections of Metrazol, which he discovered that in large doses caused convulsions. After being injected, though, his patients stayed conscious, despite the considerable pain their bodies were in, until they lost consciousness altogether during the seizure.

     Meduna published reports of a marginal success with his treatment, but he also suggested it was the extreme fear that the patients experienced after the injection and before the seizure that might be the key factor in their “improvement.” In any case, the brutality of the treatment was considered a good trade-off for the marginal effects, regardless of how they had been achieved.

     In 1938 he emigrated to America and ended up in the much more benign field of psychiatric research into dream-like states of psychosis.

     By then other psychiatrists had gone about seeking a “better” way to induce a grand mal seizure. The Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti had observed that electroshocking pigs reduced them to apathy so that they could easily be slaughtered, and he had his own bright idea. In 1938 he performed his first electroshock on a human to induce a grand mal seizure and “cure” the man’s schizophrenia.

     The homeless patient’s face turned purple and a convulsion set in for forty-eight seconds, but he lived through it. Today a million people a year “live through” ECT across the world. We have Signori Cerletti to thank for perfecting this barbarous treatment, which the World Health Organization has labeled torture. However, it was originally Meduna’s now debunked “bright idea” of the connection between schizophrenia and seizures that set psychiatry down a road littered with those patients whose souls have been brutally cancelled, along with their “schizophrenia.”

Glia (or glial cells) are non-neuronal cells in the central and peripheral nervous systems. They
do not send electrical signals like nerves. Instead, they feed, protect, and support neurons. The word comes from a Greek term meaning” [ 1 , 2 ]