All in the Mind

Psychiatrists probing into the mysterious workings of the human mind discussed some bright new theories last week:

Hint from Histamine. Histamine, a natural body chemical, has long been a medical whipping boy, blamed by some for allergies, stomach ulcers and migraine headaches. For 35 years psychiatrists have wondered about its role in mental disorders. They had one puzzling clue: people with psychoses had fewer allergies. Four years ago, three Manhattan brother-psychiatrists, Drs. Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, began treating patients with histamine. Last year they were joined by Dr. Johan van Ophuijsen, 67, pioneer Dutch Freudian who has been in the U.S. since 1935.

Last week, to a specially called staff meeting at Long Island's Creedmoor State Hospital, they gave a cautiously optimistic report on their work. They had given injections of histamine to 38 disturbed patients. Ten (about 26%) improved; five of the ten improved enough to leave the hospital. The results were about the same as with a control group who had been given the more dangerous electric shock treatment. The doctors also found that patients who were first given histamine reacted better when given electric shock. In another series of treatments on 48 office patients with histamine alone, eleven showed slight improvement and 17 "moderate to marked" improvement.

The theory behind the treatment, say the Drs. Sackler, is that histamine may give the brain a better blood supply by dilating the blood vessels. Electric shock, they think, works by increasing the amount of histamine. One advantage of the new treatment: the patient need not go to a hospital. The novel histamine report, Dr. van Ophuijsen suspected, would raise a "healthy storm."

No Raised Voices. In trying to find out why children become mentally ill, psychiatrists often cast a disapproving Freudian eye on parents. Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Trude Tietze studied 25 mothers of schizophrenic patients. The mothers of schizophrenics, she reported in Psychiatry, are apt to be "subtly dominating." They never raise their voices to their children; they control by showing a "hurt" attitude, or by having a timely sick headache or fainting spell. The children thus have no chance for open rebellion.

Only six of the 25 children she studied ever let off emotional steam through the safety valve of temper tantrum. They were "good children" who bottled up their emotions, cracked up later when they were about to finish school and face the world. Vienna-trained Dr. Tietze did not live to see her report published; on May 7, she died, at 39, from cancer.

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