(GABA antagonists)
that sounds interesting. where can I read more about them?
Here's a post I wrote about them on another forum:
"An obvious possibility which has already been pointed out is that of GABA antagonists. This means of torture has already been implemented, with fervor and enthusiasm, by psychiatrists, in the 1930's and '40's, as an early application of shock therapy. It was first applied in 1934 by Ladislas von Meduna, the hungarian neurologist that also discovered carbogen. He popularized the induction of seizures in patients with camphor, then Pentylenetetrazol (or Metrazol), GABA antagonists.
I assume the effects of benzodiazepine withdrawal are known to people here. The
metrazol experience was practicaly a benzo withdrawal that increases in intensity over the course of a few minutes up to one hour to its conclusion: a tonic-clonic seizure. If you have felt the effects of benzo withdrawal, try to imagine the feeling increasing continuously and implacably until you basically have an epileptic fit.
To put it in perspective, later electro shock treatment was substituted: "a Swiss psychiatrist stopped using the treatment because it caused "agonizing fears of dying and crumbling away" "ECT was a great step up. Patients did not vomit, as they did in the course of Metrazol shock, and they did not experience as much psychological trauma."
"Its advantages: 1) the convulsions are not usually as violent as those produced by metrazol; 2) since patients lose consciousness immediately, they do not remember the frightening "aura" that precedes a metrazol convulsion"
So there you have it: the pleasures of the mother of all benzo withdrawals, a grand mal seizure and an ECT session all rolled into one, with the added bonus of remembering it all, unlike with ECT or a grand mal seizure which cause retrograde amnesia, sparing people of the traumatic memories.
Here is how a Time article from 1939 describes it:
"A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a hoarse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsion is over, and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions."
...
"So horrible are the artificial epileptic fits forced by metrazol that practically no patients ever willingly submit. Common symptoms are a "flash of blinding light," an "aura of terror." One patient described the treatment as death "by the electric chair." Another asked piteously: "Doctor, is there any cure for this treatment?"
More serious than this subjective terror are dislocations of the jaw, tiny compression fractures of the spine, which occurred to metrazol patients in over 40% of one series of cases. During their violent convulsions, patients arch their backs with such force that sometimes they literally crush their vertebrae."
And a video from the period:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp8pY5wQ6nA
A Metrazol session would also leave a pleasant afterglow:
"Vomiting and nausea were common. Many would beg doctors and nurses not to leave, calling for their mothers, wanting to “be hugged, kissed and petted.” Some would masturbate, some would become amorous toward the medical staff, and some would play with their own feces."
But most revealing I think are the patients' own reactions to the drug:
"Metrazol’s other shortcoming was that after a first injection, patients would invariably resist another and have to be forcibly treated. Asylum psychiatrists, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry and other medical journals, described how patients would cry, plead that they “didn’t want to die,” and beg them “in the name of humanity” to stop the injections. Why, some patients would wail, did the hospital want to “kill” them? “Doctor,” one woman pitifully asked, “is there no cure for this treatment?” Even military men who had borne “with comparative fortitude and bravery the brunt of enemy action” were said to cower in terror at the prospect of a metrazol injection. One patient described it as akin to “being roasted alive in a white-hot furnace”; another “as if the skull bones were about to be rent open and the brain on the point of bursting through them.” The one theme common to nearly all patients, Katzenelbogen concluded in 1940, was a feeling “of being excessively frightened, tortured, and overwhelmed by fear of impending death.”"
I found the remark on former combatants' terror in the face of metrazol most interesting. From my general understanding of the world, combat is the most traumatic experience naturally available. Therefore these drugs seem to be in the select league of substances capable of causing experiences totally outside the realm of normal human reality.
Some links:
http://radgeek.com/gt/2006/04/14/over_my/
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...2822-1,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...5586-1,00.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200102/smith
http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/gazette/p...s/54vol2/Part5
"
Also, the kids round my parts with no drugs sometimes get high on Benzydamine, or Pussy Powder as it's known locally, sold as Tantum Rosa douche solution. They describe some sort of anticholinergic hallucinations but horrible overstimulation, shit feeling and a bad hangover.
