Refreshing the Wells 22

A Concise Encyclopaedia of Psychiatry

First published in 1972, this book is a testament to how things change, and how a powerful belief in one decade can become possibly horrifying, certainly different, in the next.

This is part of the description of a detention centre for ‘junior offenders’. “Officialy described as ‘brisk and firm’.

Narco-analysis was ‘a form of treatment used extensively in the war neuroses of the second world war’. They describe this as ‘slow intravenous injection of a short-acting barbituate’ and say that ‘deaths in some patients have been reported.’

It’s also full of brilliant story starters. Terms like Belle Indifference, hypnopompic phenomena, Latah and Effort Syndrome.

Fascinating stuff.