Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

by Judith Grisel

Barbital was a wonder drug. The ability to sedate and promote sleep in clinical patients was no small feat. An Italian psychiatrist, Giuseppe Epifanio, was the first to report on this effect in an article published in 1915, though because it was during the war, and in Italian, it wasn’t widely appreciated. He wrote to describe the result of giving phenobarbital to a nineteen-year-old girl with resistant manic-depressive psychosis. Not only did she fall into a deep sleep, but she went into an extended remission. Eventually “sleep cures” consisting of prolonged sleep therapy caught on and during the 1920s were the only pharmacological treatment for psychosis. They were also used for autism, delirium tremens, and morphine withdrawal.