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. 2016 Nov 1;13(4):99-101.
doi: 10.1192/s2056474000001458. eCollection 2016 Nov.

Hysterical stupor or yogic sleep? The conundrum

Manohar Dhadphale  1
Affiliations

Hysterical stupor or yogic sleep? The conundrum

Manohar Dhadphale. BJPsych Int. .

Abstract

A woman in the care of the author 40 years ago was reported to have been sleeping for 2 days. We treated her condition as conversion hysteria. Her private psychiatrist was the renowned R. D. Laing; he was unhappy with our line of management, on the grounds of the arbitrariness of the diagnosis, the labelling of the woman with a diagnosis of hysteria and the treatment of the patient without her consent. In retrospect, I wonder if she was in a state of yogic sleep (yoga nidra).

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