Status epilepticus, the grim reaper of the mental health system in early Victoria.

In an era when patients with refractory epilepsy were managed in mental asylums in the colonial days of Victoria, Australia, the opinion of the administration was that such patients seemed to have a benign prognosis. However the decision to collect all female epileptics in the colony and manage them in the Ballarat Mental Hospital, effected in 1901, allowed scrutiny of the progress of a cohort of 96 patients over the first seventeen years of the twentieth century, thereby revealing that under asylum conditions no less than a third of their number died as the result of status epilepticus. The results of this survey and the reasons for such an outcome are discussed.