Insulin coma therapy: let's be factual.

Abstract

There are factual errors in Dr Alan Gibson’s letter in the August 2014 issue.1 By the time he worked, as he says, in the ‘intellectual giant’, Martin Roth’s insulin unit, 1956–1959, my two papers which showed there was, over 20 years, no serious evidence for insulin coma being of any value in schizophrenia – ‘The insulin myth’2 and ‘Insulin coma in decline’3 – had both been published and were being acted upon worldwide. However, Roth in his psychiatry textbook in 1961, a few years later, made no mention of any of this but actually still continued to advocate insulin coma therapy as if there were nowhere any doubts about it. However, I was indebted to Martin Roth for sponsoring my resolution at the World Psychiatric Association in 1973 to expel the Soviet Association for permitting the imprisonment of political dissidents in Soviet mental hospitals.