"I’m going crazy".

A woman in her 30s asked me as her family doctor for a referral to a psychiatrist because she knew she was going crazy.

She had been increasingly stress by her demanding son and overbearing husband so she went to the library and borrowed a book on relaxation. She read the instructions then sat in a chair, closed her eyes and relaxed her toes … then her feet …

She was strung up that by the time she got to her ankles, her whole body let go … and she was spooked. She managed to pull herself back from the brink, but was then experiencing increasing episodes of stuckness. She would become paralysed half way though a doorway, part the way to lift ing her spoon to her mouth at breakfast … and these experience terrified her.

I was just starting to learn about hypnosis and offered her the idea that she didn’t have a problem, but was just too good at this, that she was relaxing to much too quickly and felt out of control.

She agreed to spend 10 - 15 minutes with men each weekday for the next 2 weeks where I guided her into mild relaxation, and then out of it again.

After these experiences, her terror dissipated and she continued with her family life. I continued to be her doctor for several years, and there was no further problem.

If I had referred her to a psychiatrist, she would have been diagnosed as having catatonic schizophrenia. In retrospect I now realise she was experiencing spontaneous catalepsy - a common experience in hypnosis, but in spite of my ignorance, she was saved from a lifetime of pathologising treatment, which most likely would have also contaminated her son’s future.