Status epilepticus, the grim reaper of the mental health system in early Victoria.

Peter F Bladin

Journal: Journal of clinical neuroscience : official journal of the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia 2009;10(6):655-60

PMID: 14592611

Full Text on Elsevier Science View on PubMed

Abstract

In an era when patients with refractory epilepsy were managed in mental asylums in the colonial days of Victoria, Australia, the opinion of the administration was that such patients seemed to have a benign prognosis. However the decision to collect all female epileptics in the colony and manage them in the Ballarat Mental Hospital, effected in 1901, allowed scrutiny of the progress of a cohort of 96 patients over the first seventeen years of the twentieth century, thereby revealing that under asylum conditions no less than a third of their number died as the result of status epilepticus. The results of this survey and the reasons for such an outcome are discussed.

Address: Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, Austin-Repatriation Medical Centre, Melbourne, Australia.

DOI: 10.1016/s0967-5868(03)00071-7

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MeSH Terms: Anticonvulsants, Bromides, Cohort Studies, Commitment of Persons with Psychiatric Disorders, Epilepsy, Female, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century, Hospitals, Psychiatric, Humans, Neurocognitive Disorders, Sex Distribution, Status Epilepticus, Victoria