Evidence of Trephination dates back as far as half a million years ago. An instrument probably stone was used to cut away a circular section of the skull. It is proposed that this was done to alleviate people who suffered from behavior that wasn't deemed normal.
Possession is a worldwide phenomenon still used to explain mental illness. Demonic possession of a person's body was believed by European and American Christians, Egyptians, Chinese and Native Americans. Exorcism of various kinds were used as treatment for it. Skulls as shown above can be found from all over the world.
Hippocrates considered the father modern medicine, created the idea that all abnormal behavior can attributed to physical problems. To him brain disease was the culprit of afflictions, an imbalance of the body four body fluids: yellow ile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Accordingly, a patient was treated by practices like bloodletting.
In the 1500s European hospitals and monasteries were converted into asylums. Overpopulation of these public facilities created overcrowding and patients were treated cruelly in filthy, deplorable conditions. These places became tourist attractions where people paid admittance to walk through areas where patients were chained to walls.
Moral Treatments
In the 1800s Phillipe Pinel sought to change treatment of people with mental disorders allowing patients to walk freely and live in well-lit rooms. Music therapy and was also introduced during this time. Benjamin Rush required that hospitals employ intelligent and gentler people to work with patients.
Boston schoolteacher Dorthea Dix relentlessly worked (1841-1881) to change state legislature by communicating the horrible treatment the mentally ill received. Dix also helped establish 32 state hospitals that offered moral treatment of patients.
Despite these leaps and bounds bizarre methods of therapy were used without success like: tooth extractions, tonsillectomies, hydrotherapy and bindings in blankets, baths, straitjackets.
Psycholanalysis was introduced later in 1800s and early 1900s as a type of treatment used to soothe a patient, this form of talk therapy helped a patient discuss their unconscious roots of problems.
Inhumane treatment continued
Little was know about mental illnesses and disorders even in the early 1900s there continued to be cruel methods of treatment for the mentally ill. The worst treatments were lobotomies, insulin therapy where patients were given shots of insulin and induced into seizures and insulin comas and electro-shock therapy. In the beginning of the 1920s to late as the 1970s patients considered mentally incompetent were given forced sterilizations.
Deinstitutionalization
Deinstitutionalization created partly by the introduction of anti-psychotic drugs, released thousands of people from live-in state hospitals. In 1955 nearly 600,000 patients lived in state hospitals currently there are only 60,000. In the 1960s and 1980s cutting funding from state hospitals also precipitated deinstitutionalization releasing thousands of people into the streets quite literally, many of them now homeless.
