[wiretwister]

Odd and Outlandish Psychiatric Treatments Through History
Bret S. Stetka, MD; John Watson | April 13, 2016 (from Medscape)

In the first years of the 1900s, psychiatry was positioned awkwardly between entrenched notions that mental illness represented hereditary, character-based failings, and the more vanguard Freudian concept of psychoanalysis. Those seeking another way forward had an unfortunate role model in Henry Cotton, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton. Cotton believed that mental illness had one cause alone: bodily infections whose toxins were responsible for poisoning the brain. Cotton sought to remove these chronic infections at their source, which he took to be his patients' teeth, tonsils, spleens, uteri, and other organs. Claiming cure rates of more than 80%, Cotton was in fact obscuring mortality rates for some procedures of approximately 45%.[4] Although no one is clamoring for a return to the brutal methods proposed by Cotton, renewed research on the role of inflammation in mental illness indicates his idea that mental illness is linked to infection may, in some cases, carry some weight.

Many early 20th-century psychiatrists—particularly those at the London Asylum for the Insane—embraced the potential healing powers of water. It was thought that extremely hot or cold showers, water wraps, and baths could treat a variety of mental maladies, including insomnia, suicidal ideation, aggression, and manic depression. Baths could last as long as several days and often took place in dimly lit, soothing locations, and may have provided the psychiatric benefits of various forms of meditation appreciated today. A 1908 document from the Illinois Board of State Commissioners of Public Charity reads, "Reports from a large number of public and private hospitals for the insane in the United States show that hydrotherapy has been most extensively used for the past three years, and invariably each medical director speaks in the highest terms of this hypnotic and eliminative [treatment]."

Once identified as "the disease of the century," neurosyphilis gripped the public's imagination with a particularly vivid neurologic presentation that often involved grand delusions, paralysis, and dementia. However, in the years leading up to World War I, the first tangible strategies for combating the illness began to arrive. The first such breakthrough occurred when the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg noticed that residents of the asylum where he worked seemed to return to sanity after experiencing a febrile episode. Wagner-Jauregg tested various means of inducing fever. In 1917, he reported positive results after inoculating patients with intravenous injections of malaria, followed by quinine treatment after resolution of syphilitic symptoms. The treatment was later rendered obsolete by the discovery of penicillin. Nonetheless, Wagner-Jauregg's work was notable for linking psychosis to a potentially natural cause—a goal since the days of Hippocrates, but one that had failed to overcome more popular moralistic and stigmatizing ideas about how psychiatric disorders arise. His efforts garnered him a Nobel Prize, making him the first psychiatrist, and one of the very few to date, to receive the honor

A decade after the discovery of insulin in 1922, German physician Manfred Sakel began using the hormone to treat the symptoms of opioid withdrawal. Not long after that, he set his sights on treating schizophrenia. Insulin doses were often so high that patients would fall into a stupor or coma, rendering them more cooperative and free of their psychiatric symptoms (in Sakel's eyes). The treatment caught on in the United States in the 1930s alongside electroconvulsive therapy, and was adopted by most respected American academic institutions (as well as the US military during World War II). Mortality rates varied from 1% to a not-so-reassuring 10%. With the introduction of chlorpromazine (Thorazine) in the 1950s—a safer, cheaper, and equally effective alternative—insulin shock therapy was eventually phased out across the country.

In 1934, the Hungarian neuropathologist Ladislas Joseph von Meduna made an observation: Schizophrenia and epilepsy rarely co-presented in individual patients. This assumption has since been proven false; patients with epilepsy are now thought to have an eightfold increased risk for schizophrenia, and evidence also exists for a genetic overlap between the two disorders.[7,8] At the time, however, it proved persuasive enough for von Meduna to seek therapies that would induce seizures to cure patients of their schizophrenia. After initially trying to induce seizures by injecting the blood of epileptic patients into those with schizophrenia, von Meduna soon turned to chemical agents, beginning with camphor oil and eventually settling on cardiazol. von Meduna is credited with recognizing the value of inducing complete seizures and is considered a forefather of electroconvulsive therapy.

Wilhelm Reich, the famous (or perhaps infamous) psychoanalyst, was born in 1897 in Austria. By the time he died in a Pennsylvania jail cell in 1957, he had gone from one of Freud's most promising pupils to a pariah within the psychiatric community. Like his mentor's theories of the human libido, Reich determined humanity's sexual impulses to be a major source of its dysfunction. But whereas Freud prescribed a controlled inhibition of these impulses, Reich sought to unleash them. Like Franz Mesmer before him, Reich believed that life is dictated by external, quasi-supernatural energies—namely orgone, a sexual life force permeating the universe. Reich proposed that he could harness this force with a metal-and-steel wool-lined wooden box of his own devising: the orgone energy accumulator. Enough time spent in his contraption, Reich claimed, and a patient's repressions and ailments would melt away

Such was Reich's stature that he convinced Albert Einstein to spend 2 weeks studying his box's merits (Einstein couldn't find any). The US Food and Drug Administration eventually saw to it that Reich cease his dubious promotional claims about the orgone energy accumulator—an injunction he eventually broke, leading to his eventual imprisonment. Reich might be a footnote of psychiatric history if his ideas didn't dovetail so perfectly with the Age of Aquarius. In the 1960s, devotees from the world of the arts (including the writers Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs) extolled Reich's theories to a receptive nation in the midst of the sexual revolution. The scientific community has been less enthusiastic. A 2006 poll ranked orgone therapy as the third most discredited psychological treatment, just behind past-life regression therapy and using crystals for healing

The history of therapeutic experimentation is an inevitably checkered one, where even the greatest achievements can be the result of happenstance. This is perhaps no truer than in matters of the mind—the intricacies of which are just being revealed to us, thanks to technological breakthroughs that would have been unimaginable decades earlier. Rather than provoking a sense of superiority, overviews such as these ask us to think critically about our own contemporary practices. After all, today's trend could be tomorrow's travesty.

[Ocean Swimmer]

My husband got a position to Bangladesh. So I've been studying the treatment of mentally ill persons in Asia.
Omg. They're still shackling patients and keeping them in small goat sheds. Even those who are in hospitals are most likely shackled to pallets.
There are volunteer opportunities organizations trying to help locate and help these individuals.
In Bangladesh the average wage is $1.00 per day.
Amazing how we complain constantly about our weight gain and med side effects.
The average farm family can only eat every other day.
Thanks for an interresting post! Maxy

[Ocean Swimmer]

Also. Dorthea Dix. She worked tirelessly in The USA for better treatment of mental patients.

[MistressStayc]

thank you, this was an interesting read.

teaching my students about Dorthea Dix right now in U.S. History. They had alot of great questions about what is mental illness and one of my students yelled out "Us!", lol. My students have ASD and emotional behavior disorders.

[violetgreen]

"Today's trends could be tomorrow's travesty." I believe that. Sad to think about all of the persons abused in some of those experiments.

[Nammu]

I certainly see drilling holes into the skull and hard wiring the brain as a questionable tactic.