The Madness of Fear—A History of Catatonia

Abstract

“T oday (...) catatonia is edging its way back to center stage as an independent disorder,” Shorter and Fink state in their new book on the history of this startling syndrome. Thanks, not least, to the authors' relentless effort. Edward Shorter is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto. Max Fink, professor of psychiatry and neurology, emeritus, worked at Stony Brook School of Medicine, New York. The former has written extensively about the history of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); the latter, Fink, is the history of ECT. One expects to read a history book. But The Madness of Fear is so much more than that. Some phrases are so literary that one cannot resist the temptation to read them aloud repetitively making one's family members frown. Here is one: “Buffeted by psychoanalysis and blinded by the prestige of German learning, clinicians let catatonia languish in the quagmire of schizophrenia” (p117). The authors “join other scholars in the growing disbelief about ‘schizophrenia’” (p120). Throughout the book, they don't pass up a chance to criticize the concept of schizophrenia that, according to Meduna, already in 1946, “doesn't mean anything more than ‘crazy’ or ‘cracked’” (p78). Not only do the authors unfold the history of catatonia, from Kahlbaum's predecessors in the early 19th century (chapter 2, “Catatonia Before Kahlbaum”) up to the so-called “resignation syndrome”marked by stupor among refugee children coming to Sweden, first described not more than 2 years ago. They also offer the reader a clinical lesson. Fink and Shorter want the reader to recognize the clinical picture of catatonia, to detect a severe condition that is fairly easy to cure. In an erawhere it is “bon ton” to hail dimensional diagnoses and demonize categorical labeling, Fink states it is our job as medical doctors to label our patients, provided that the label specifies an identifiable syndrome and brings a successful treatment (Fink, personal communication, May 6, 2018). A myriad of case descriptions with a sense of phenomenological detail that has