Carl Solomon underwent insulin shock therapy at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s. During his treatments, he would enter a coma and experience altered states of consciousness where he felt omnipresent and outside of time. When emerging from the comas, he would cry and flail his arms wildly, screaming for help. The document provides excerpts from Solomon's writing describing his intensely surreal and distressing experiences with shock therapy.
Carl Solomon underwent insulin shock therapy at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s. During his treatments, he would enter a coma and experience altered states of consciousness where he felt omnipresent and outside of time. When emerging from the comas, he would cry and flail his arms wildly, screaming for help. The document provides excerpts from Solomon's writing describing his intensely surreal and distressing experiences with shock therapy.
Carl Solomon underwent insulin shock therapy at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s. During his treatments, he would enter a coma and experience altered states of consciousness where he felt omnipresent and outside of time. When emerging from the comas, he would cry and flail his arms wildly, screaming for help. The document provides excerpts from Solomon's writing describing his intensely surreal and distressing experiences with shock therapy.
Carl Solomon underwent insulin shock therapy at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in the 1950s. During his treatments, he would enter a coma and experience altered states of consciousness where he felt omnipresent and outside of time. When emerging from the comas, he would cry and flail his arms wildly, screaming for help. The document provides excerpts from Solomon's writing describing his intensely surreal and distressing experiences with shock therapy.
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Shock therapy
What is shock therapy?
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), formerly known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. 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
Carl Solomons Report from the Asylum (1950) Carl Solomon (1928 1993) was an American writer. In his youth, he was voluntarily institutionalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New York State. At the Hospital, he underwent shock-therapy.
Upon being strapped into my insulin bed, I would at once break off my usual stream of puns and hysterical chatter. I would stare at the bulge I made beneath the canvas restraining sheet, and my body, insulin-packed, would become to me an enormous concrete pun with infinite levels of association, and thereby a means of surmounting association with things, much as the verbal puns had surmounted the meaning of words....
Each coma is utterly incomparable to that of the previous day. Lacking a time-sense and inhabiting all of these universes at one and the same time, my condition was one of omnipresence of being everywhere at no time Invariably, I emerged from the comas bawling like an infant and flapping my arms crazily (after they had been unfastened), screaming Help!
Task: 1. Underline key words or phrases in Solomons writing above. 2. What adjectives can you think of to describe his experience? 3. Using your work from tasks 1 and 2, write a poem in pairs about Carl Solomons experience. You can choose to write it in the first person or the third person. Think about sound effects and incorporating different voices (e.g. the nurses).