5 Previous Mental Health Practices You May Not Know Much About
October 03, 2024
October 03, 2024
The digital age has transformed our access to mental health support. Teletherapy offers care from the comfort of home. Mobile apps minimize a provider shortage in a cost-effective way. ChatGPT is being approached by users as a form of artificial intelligence therapy, relieving mental distress.
Would scientists of the past be as surprised by our modern health practices as we are by theirs? Decide for yourself by exploring these 5 historic mental health practices:
Figure 1 Profile of skull with hole in it, RAI Publications Collections, n.d. Source: The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britan and Ireland
One of the earliest forms of psychosurgery, trephination consists of drilling a hole in the skull. The procedure dates to around ~6000 B.C as evidenced by remains from North Africa, Ukraine, and Portugal. Trephination was used to treat medical conditions such as epilepsy, as well as to exorcise evil spirits that were believed to cause behavioral disorders. This method faced popular resurgences throughout history, namely in the 19th century during the American Civil War (1861-1865) to treat head wounds. A piece on Wiley Digital Archives, Is Trephining the Skull a Dangerous Operation Per Se? explores the dangers of the procedure which was believed to have a 40% survival rate.
Trephination was even used in experiments on animals as evidenced by our archives. The Medical Work of Pasteur by Dr. Emile Roux examines veterinary trephination conducted by the father of pasteurization, Louis Pasteur, to study rabies inoculation in animals.
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Giving a totally new meaning to the term “spin doctor,” rotation therapy, or spinning therapy, was popular in western culture throughout the 19th century and involved patients being spun in a chair at a speed determined by the severity of their mental illness. The associated vertigo was said to ease “brain congestion” while vomiting was thought to purge problematic conditions.
The device, commonly called “Cox’s chair,” was named after physician Joseph Cox, who explained its use in an 1804 book on treatments for insanity. Cox dedicated a chapter to the circulating chair as a method of treatment and was inspired by Erasmus Darwin’s rotative couch device.
According to 19th-century proceedings from the British Medical Association in our archives, the rotating chair was displayed in a series of demonstrations to target war neuroses (which would later come to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder).
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3. A “palace for lunatics:” Bethlem Royal Hospital
As England’s first mental asylum, the Bethlem Royal Hospital, named after the term bedlam, meaning uproar, was founded in the 13th century and became notorious for its brutal treatment of the mentally ill, including the use of chains, beatings, and bloodletting. The hospital underwent several reconstructions, and while the second one in 1676 featured beautiful architecture, it was called a “palace for lunatics” where cruel practices persisted. Shockingly, spectators were even allowed to observe patients for a fee.
A Wiley Digital Archives’ manuscript from 1853 describes the facility in-depth, noting that it was “so loathsome and so filthily kept that it was not fit for any man to enter.”
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Lobotomy boomed in the 1930s as a surgical treatment for mental health conditions by separating the frontal lobe from other parts of the brain. Before drug therapy, procedures like lobotomy, leucotomy, and topectomy were seen as successful due to their ability to pacify patients. However, these surgeries often resulted in profound and damaging changes to a patient’s character and personality. Lobotomies were sometimes performed on individuals without mental illness, including those persecuted for their sexual orientation, such as homosexual men.
Our archives demonstrate that most lobotomy patients were female. In a report from the ministry of health, lobotomy was noted as a “form of physical treatment for mental disorder” that treated 1397 patients (497 male and 900 female) in England and Wales between 1950-1951. So, why women? One reason was to cure hysteria, a diagnosis of the past that Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell described as “an over-stimulation of the mind and a woman’s inability to cope due to an inferior mental capacity.”
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How is tradition considered in mental health practice? In Psychiatry and Mental Health in Africa – Prospects for the Future, Dr. Edward L. Margettes debates the use of traditional dance and medicine men in Africa. Margettes believes that medicine men can "do some good" but expresses concern about faith- or fear-based healing. "They probably do more harm than good. There seems little rationale to fit traditional healing into a mental health program in Africa today," he writes.
“As technological, industrial, medical and welfare services improve, there will be less inclination for the sick to rely on these old ways,” Margettes continues in a mid-to-late 20th century perspective.
Explore more stories about mental health in Wiley Digital Archives, from outdated terminology and prescribed trips abroad to the mystery of “soldier's heart” and beyond. Interested in a deep dive of your own? Check out how our archives can help your researchers with a free trial.
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