The human brain has been, and always will be, a mystery. The more we learn about the way the brain works, the more accepting of various mental ailments we are. Before the Enlightenment period, however, we essentially treated mentally ill individuals as zoo animals to experiment on and gawk at. Even after the Enlightenment, without fairly recent advances in neuroscience, our treatment of the unstable would be considered quite cruel.
Madhouses.
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Madhouses pretended to be hospitals, but really just prisons for the mentally unbalanced. It was a free-for-all mess that didn’t really involve much treatment at all besides intense baby sitting. Many of the patients of these “wards” weren’t even crazy at all. Many were just too poor or weird to be allowed to be in public. Men would regularly drop off wives they no longer found appealing and there wasn’t really much they could do about it. English writer Daniel Defoe once said about madhouses, “if they were not mad when they arrived, they certainly ended up so”.
Chemically Induced Seizures.
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One doctor noticed his patients had a certain blissful calmness after having a seizure and thought maybe a way to cure his schizophrenic patients would be to recreate this using drugs. Similar to coma therapy, this treatment actually seemed to work, but the risk involved was ultimately not worth it.
Mesmerism (Magnet Therapy).
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Franz Mesmer believed that the gravity of the moon affects everyone’s bodily functions and then if he could only harness that power he could cure mental illnesses. Then he found magnets. They didn’t really work, but Mesmer is remembered for being the origin of the word “mesmerize”.
Rotational Therapy.
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The idea here was that mental illness is best treated when a patient is asleep, and of course spinning them around at a hilarious speed is the best way to do this. Oddly enough they guy that came up with this terrible idea was the father of Charles Darwin.
Insulin-Coma Therapy.
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In 1927, one doctor was treating a female patient for diabetes and accidentally gave her too much insulin, which resulted in a coma. When the woman woke up, she was cured of her drug addiction. This “forced coma” treatment became quite popular, with an inexplicable 90% success rate. The only danger? Putting patients in a coma.
Female Hysteria Treatment.
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Various women with mental illnesses (as well healthy women) were lumped together and described as having “female hysteria.” It was the belief that this hysteria was caused in the female uterus, therefore the common treatment was a hysterectomy. Plato believed the best treatment however was for women to get married and have babies. Lots of babies.
We’re still discovering new things about mental illnesses every day, but at least we’re not spinning people in circles or putting them in comas willy-nilly.
