Thursday 30 June 2011

Treatment of mental disorders : from the Stone Age till the Middle Ages.

Trephination
A trephination was an ancient operation in which a stone instrument was used to cut away a circular section of the skull.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Exorcisms 
If you look all the way on the left, the woman being held by a group of men, there's a devil coming out of her head. This was, of course, the early equivalent of Multiple Personality Disorder and the notion of possession theory, the body being inhabited by other beings, is an important aspect of dissociation
  






Straitjacket
This one is an individual who was chained to a wall, and this is a form of a straitjacket, where a person is tied directly to a drain pipe in the wall. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here are pictures of an early version of the straitjacket itself, a chair incorporating a straitjacket restraint, and another commonly used psychiatric restraint. 












Shock Treatment
This is a water shock treatment, and another version of it appears here, where an individual is left blind-folded on the platform, suddenly the platform falls from beneath him and he's dumped into a bucket of ice cold water. This was intended to be shocking.  
Another form is noise shock treatment which involved firing a cannon behind somebody without them knowing that it was going to happen. Again, the idea was to use a form of violent cure because of a theory of violent possession. 
Even electric shock treatment has a history in antiquity. The ancient Egyptians used to take a torpedo fish and slap it on the forehead of people who were possessed, and the fish would discharge an electric current, and that's the earliest record of electroshock treatment. 










Seclusion 
Seclusion in its worst form is the Wooden Crib or Restraining Bed. This is a form of containment in which that person is totally strapped into a crib with no way to move. 







Chair
The Rush Chair or Restraining Chair was also used to limit motion and reduce sensory stimulation by covering the head and blocking vision.
 
 
 
 
 Another device used to induce a state of shock was the rotating chair. A person could last only a few seconds in this chair without becoming nauseous and eventually losing consciousness

And then there was the tranquilizing chair, all of these devices were used in the late 1800's



Most historians believe that prehistoric societies regarding abnormal behavior as the work of evil spirits. These early societies apparently explained all phenomena as resulting from the actions of magical, something sinister being who controlled the world. In particular they viewed a human body and mind as a battle ground between external forces of good and evil. Abnormal behavior was seen as a victory by evil spirits. The cure for this conquer, was to force the demon from the victim’s body.
It reported that this supernatural view began as far back as the Stone Age, a half-million years ago. Skulls from the error have been discovered in Europe and South America, which showed evidence of an operation called trephination. A trephination was an ancient operation in which a stone instrument was used to cut away a circular section of the skull. The procedure was performed on those who expressed severe abnormal behavior such as; hallucinations and melancholia. The purpose for opening the skull was to release evil spirits that were thought to be causing the behavior. In some forms of trephining, an instrument was inserted into the skull to scare out the spirit.
Later societies clearly attributed abnormal behavior to the possession of demons..The treatment for abnormal behavior in these early societies was often exorcism. The idea was to coax the demon or evil spirit to leave a person’s body. A shaman or priest preformed these sessions by reciting prayer, pleading with the evil spirit, insulting them, perform magic, make loud noises, or have the possessed drink bitter poison. If this failed, the shaman would proceed with a more extreme form of exorcism, which included whipping or starving the person.
A growing destruction of science spread throughout Europe. From A.D, 500 to 1350, the period know as the Middle Ages or even “the dark ages” , the power of the clergy greatly increased. Their beliefs, highly spiritual and demonological, dominated all aspects of life. Once again abnormal behavior was a conflict of good and evil, God and the devil.
The dark ages received is name from the desolate conditions, war, urban uprising and plague were concurring the lives of many. During this time of stress, anxiety, and the struggle for survival, there were outbreaks of mass madness , in which large numbers of people shared delusions and hallucinations. Once example, is the disorder tarantism, in which groups of people would suddenly start to jump, dance, and go into convulsion. Some of those who thought they had tarantism, would parade around oddly dressed, others would tear off their clothes and parade around in nothing at all. All of those who thought they were suffering from this disorder, apparently believed to have been bitten and poisoned by a wolf spider, now called a tarantula. Another example of mass madness was lycanthropy, in which people believed to be possessed by wolves and other animals. In these cases, people would crawl around on all fours, howling and growling. They acted uncomfortable and itchy as if hair was begging to grow from all places on their body. 
The society referred to those suffering from mental illnesses as ‘lunatics” which derived from the root word lunar meaning, “moon.” Through astrological reasoning it was believed that insanity was caused by a full moon at the time of a baby’s birth or a baby sleeping under the light of a full moon. They declared these lunatics possessed by the devil, and usually they were removed from society and locked away. 
Lunatics were grouped into two categories: mania and melancholy. The only medical procedures centered around the idea of catharsis. Colonists believed to cure an individual it was necessary to undergo cathartic medical treatment, and to either catalyze crisis or expel crisis from the individual. Such medical procedures involved submerging patients in ice baths until they lost consciousness or executing a massive shock to the brain. Means to expel crisis from the patient included inducing vomiting and the notorious “bleeding” practice. The bleeding practice entailed draining the bad blood from the individual, unfortunately this inhumane practice normally resulted in death or the need for lifelong care. Although the colonial era’s methods of handling the mentally ill and medical procedures could be considered barbaric by present- day standards, the vast majority of people were content because the lunatics were no longer visible in society.

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