Thyroid & Emotions

Psychiatrists who have noted that thyroid gland disorders may go hand in hand with mental illness have been baffled in their efforts to chart precisely which disorders produced what effects. A Manhattan group last week made a promising progress report to the American Psychiatric Association concerning triiodothyronine (known as "T3" among hormone specialists), by far the most potent of all thyroid hormones and their derivatives.

At the New York Hospital's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Dr. Frederic F. Flach. working with the Sloan-Kettering Institute's Dr. Rulon W. Rawson, gave T3 to 24 patients kept on a rigid regimen in a metabolic ward where everything they ate, drank and excreted was weighed and analyzed. Most were schizophrenics; some were psychoneurotics. Nearly all were depressed (at times suicidal), emotionally unresponsive, resentful, uninterested in sex and depersonalized (common complaints were "I am numb" and "Everything I do is automatic").

Even in minute quantities, triiodothyronine made a marked difference in 14 patients (one showed no response, and nine others showed slight changes, usually a decrease in resentment). To the psychiatrists trying to make closer contact with patients for more effective treatment, the important thing was that the 14 became markedly more responsive. In many cases the numb automatism disappeared. Emotions that had been buried in the unconscious came out in the open, could be dealt with in psychotherapy.

Far from being just another tranquilizer, the hormone brought out hostility and in some cases sexual drive in previously depressed patients, which helped the psychiatrists to pinpoint more precisely the emotional problems they faced. Because T3 may have temporarily disturbing as well as beneficial effects, Dr. Flach and colleagues see little place for its use outside a well-staffed psychiatric hospital. There, they believe, it shows great promise.

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