Transient Delusions due to Syphilis
- Author:
Eleanor Larrabee Lattimore, Ph.D., J
In Charge Social Service Department, Psychological Clinic, University of Pennsylvania.
Richard was fifteen years old and had obtained his working papers but he could not keep a job. He had trouble with his employers, and bore grudges toward his fellow employees. He was insubordinate, refusing to carry out instructions because of his unreasonable fear of the dark where skeletons and ghosts flit. He could not serve his apprenticeship as a shoe clerk satisfactorily because the stock room was in the basement and it is common knowledge that spooks haunt the corners of dark basements. When sent there on errands he would think of ghosts of people?people he had never seen in real life?who were covered with cloth. If he heard something moving in the room it would “scare the wits out of him.” If voices were heard from the adjoining room he knew they were the voices of ghosts. “They were always scrapping with me,” he said, “and going to kill me. They had a knife something like a burglar’s, and were bony.”
Richard had seen skeletons in a museum, where he went with his teacher, and once in a shop window, and again while playing. He has studied “about the flesh and the inside organs” and it “scares him a little bit” when he thinks of them. He saw ghosts at home when alone in the dark. He saw one once in the kitchen. The chief ghost always seemed to be the same person but ” of course they are not real” he concluded.
There was a peculiar mental conflict here. While realizing the ghosts were not real, yet his mind constantly dwelt upon them to such an extent that he felt he could not do his share in the support of the family. He brooded upon this inability to such a degree that kind friends wondered if he were not insane. .It was upon this suspicion that the social worker brought him to the Psychological Clinic. Richard was a delicate-looking undersized boy with a haunted and wistful expression. He had no marked physical stigmata but was hollow-chested and round-shouldered. His palate was high and contracted, his teeth in very bad condition. He had practised masturbation until recently when a boy friend warned him of the evil effects.
His home surroundings were poor, the family occupying the unheated third floor of a house, the two boys sleeping in one room, the parents and two girls of five and ten years of age occupying the other. The remainder of the house, including the use of the bath, was sublet.
The mental tests showed him to be of normal mentality with no tendency to insanity. There was no fixed phobia. The Courtis Speed Tests in arithmetic showed him to be able to do about sixth grade work, being especially good in subtraction but below grade in multiplication and division.
He had a memory span of six digits.
He responded readily in the test of “opposites,” and in the recognition of absurdities. He copied designs with the design blocks and completed the Witmer Cylinders and the Healy Construction Puzzle B, rapidly.
His response to the Jung Association test was entirely normal. All his work was done intelligently.
As a result of the psychological examination it was decided to build him up physically and to provide him with friendly counsel. Accordingly a medical examination was made and a positive Wassermann test was obtained. He was given a cathartic and a tonic and sent to a boy’s camp where one of the councilors took an interest in him. After his return he was put on anti-syphilitic treatment. He has taken his treatment faithfully and has reported to the dispensary regularly for a year and the results fully justify the effort expended.
He has lost his haunted expression and his former grouchiness. He is genial, companionable, and cheerful, a great favorite with all with whom he comes in contact, young and old like. He sees no more skeletons, and no longer thinks of them. Soon he will be in condition to have the necessary dentistry done. For six months he has been working steadily, earning $6.25 a week, as compared with a former occasional maximum of $3.00 of a year ago.
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