Insulin shock therapy

Insulin shock therapy
Intervention
Insulin shock therapy administered in Lapinlahti Hospital, Helsinki in the 1950s
ICD-9-CM	94.24
MeSH	D003295
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Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy (ICT) was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. It was introduced in 1927 by Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favour and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs in the 1960s.

It was one of a number of physical treatments introduced into psychiatry in the first four decades of the twentieth century. These included the convulsive therapies (cardiazol/metrazol therapy and electroconvulsive therapy), deep sleep therapy and psychosurgery. Insulin coma therapy and the convulsive therapies are collectively known as the shock therapies.

In 1927 Sakel, who had recently qualified as a doctor in Vienna and was working in a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, began to use low (sub-coma) doses of insulin to treat drug addicts and psychopaths. Having returned to Vienna, he treated schizophrenic patients with larger doses of insulin in order to produce coma and sometimes convulsions. Sakel made public his results in 1933 and his methods were soon taken up by other psychiatrists.

Joseph Wortis, after seeing Sakel practice it in 1935, introduced it to the USA. British psychiatrists from the Board of Control visited Vienna in 1935 and 1936, and by 1938 thirty-one hospitals in England and Wales had insulin treatment units. In 1936 Sakel moved to New York and promoted the use of insulin coma treatment in American psychiatric hospitals. By the late 1940s the majority of psychiatric hospitals in the USA were using insulin coma treatment.

Insulin coma therapy was a labour-intensive treatment that required trained staff and a special unit. Patients, who were almost invariably diagnosed with schizophrenia, were selected on the basis of having a good prognosis and the physical strength to withstand an arduous treatment. There were no standard guidelines for treatment; different hospitals and psychiatrists developed their own protocols. Typically, injections were administered six days a week for about two months.