June 14, 1998
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SHOPLIFTING.
There have been 376 of 1340 patients who have engaged in shoplifting, the majority in childhood. A number have engaged in this activity purposefully, due to their financial condition; especially lately since the welfare cheques were reduced by 21%, and the rent for their accommodation stayed the same. This resulted in many of them telling me that they had no money for food during the last 2 weeks of each month.
In addition there have been a number of patients who pick up items in stores, and put them in their purses, or pockets, and leave the store, sometimes paying for the remainder of items they picked out, but forgetting the one in their pocket, and they get stopped just outside the door of the store, 18 were arrested and went to court. I wrote letters for several patients, and quoted the article by Dr. Alexander Bonkalo on this subject. Most of these cases were dismissed and did not have to spend time in jail.
Their stories are very similar. I will tell you some of them.
When a patient has cataplexy one's thinking is confused and one's decision making ability is much reduced. Another patient had been charged with shoplifting in 1990, in a situation such as I have described above, and recently returned because his wife had been nagging him about their son who did not have clothes similar to the other 15 year old boys at school, so he and the son went to a clothing store. There they picked out some items, and the father changed the labels on the items, and was arrested outside the store. This man was emotionally upset that day and particularly at the time in the store. To me it is obvious that he had cataplexy with his emotional reaction. This led to his inability to decide what to do, and he made a very wrong conclusion which got him into trouble.
Another situation occurs--The patients have quick bad tempers and when disagreed with, get into physical violence. This frequently leads to charges of assault, and often results in their being sent to jail for varying times.
e.g. One man of 126 lbs and 5'6", a heavy drinker was stopped on a street in another city by 3 policemen in a cruiser. He became angry and apparently got into automatic behaviour; threw one officer over the cruiser, pushed the second under the cruiser, got Cataplexy and lost his strength at this time and the third officer sat on him.
Another man of 5'10" about 180 lbs, had his shoulder bumped by a much larger black man who said "You mother-f..... honky you". My patient begged his pardon, and the statement was repeated, and my patient took the larger black man down and beat his head across and back in the intersection, stopping traffic. A truck driver blew his air horn repeatedly, and my patient was aroused, said to himself "What am I doing", and stopped and ran away before the police arrived. Another time he accepted a ride in the back of a car, went to sleep, and was awakened by police who arrested him for stealing the car, and sent him to jail for some time.
One of my lady patients, who has Partial Complex Seizures, in one of the attacks, picked up a reclining chair and threw it across the room. She weighs about 100 lbs and is 5'3". another time this occurred when having a bath, and she became frightened during the seizure, wrapped a towel around her and ran out on the street.
I got a phone call from Mrs. U. two days ago, stating that she was not well and that her husband had fallen and hurt himself. She has spent many years having feelings of sexual arousal, and standing on the front verandah, or some other outside part of the house and shouting at the neighbour of that direction that they must stop turning the sex on, and making her upset. Should one think that this is a cataplexy induced physical hallucination, or is it Complex Partial Seizures? Her husband died in Sept. 1998. I have finally decided that she is having psychomotor epileptic seizures, which are mostly verbal.
October 27, 1998
Yesterday I saw a man who is on probation for 3 years, with the provison that he see a psychiatrist regularly. He has been in jail, Metfors, and I will get their reports shortly. He is on Respridal 3mg iii qhs. He stated he does not like it and would like to get on some pill he had in Queen St. Mental Health Centre which he feels suits him better. He is diagnosed as a Schizophrenic. He complains of little, and one has to get his history from his wife, in his presence. He is very suspicious of other people who in public looking at him and this causes him to be agitated. He has injured his wife on occasion. It seems to me that while he went to school to grade 6 in Manitoba, and then left home, worked on the rail road in a maintenance job for 23 years, met his wife on a holiday in Florida in 1974, married in 1975, and I will get the rest of his history later. He engages in acts of kleptomania, taking things that he feels he is owed. He has suffered from severe Dyslexia all his life, and only learned to read as an adult from some volunteer helping him when he was in prison.
One wonders if he is not another Narcoleptic, with confused thinking when he has cataplexy.