This image is reportedly of Rhoda Derry, taken during her incarceration in Adams County Almshouse between 1860 and 1904.
Rhoda scratched out her own eyes, punched out all of her teeth and covered herself in nasty bruises from head to toe.
Growing up, she had been obsessed with the boy next door, but was cursed by his grandmother who didn’t approve.
The hex allegedly triggered a long held fear of witches in the young girl and led to a complete mental collapse.
Rhoda lived out her days in a wooden box, believing that she was tormented by an evil spirit named “Old Scratch”...
This patient in a mental institute in Japan sits on his bed, wearing a childish mask of a white dog in a French beret.
He has been living in the institute for years and refuses to remove the mask, which completely covers his face...
...and any attempts to remove it can result in him barking angrily at the medical staff when he becomes upset.
The condition is called Scopophobia, an anxiety disorder which manifest as a terror of being seen or stared at by others.
It often begins as a teenager when the fear of being criticized or disliked grows into a terrifying feeling of shame.
This photo, believed to be taken in the 1880s, is from the basement of the US Government Hospital for the Insane...
...and shows a neatly placed line of mentally disturbed patients wrapped tightly in wet sheets and immobilized.
Hydrotherapy wraps were a popular treatment for insanity and agitated patients were “cooled” down with ice water.
Catatonic patients, on the other hand, would be strapped into stimulating warm baths for days against their will.
More extreme treatments included patients being strapped down and sprayed with jets until they calmed down.
Here, French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, is performing test for his book “The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression”
He took an old, toothless man as his test subject and manipulated the facial muscles by using electrical probes.
The old man was one of 6 subjects from the Parisian asylum Salpêtrière tested thanks to the recent invention of photography.
Duchenne believed that the expressions were directly linked to the soul of a man so the muscles were somehow a link to this...
...and he wanted to collect these different facial states so that he could build a map of the inner states of a man.
Also at work in the Salpêtrière asylum was Albert Londe, whose 12 lens camera could photograph rapid movements...
...such as the violent fit and convulsions of hysteria captured here in this chronophotographic image.
Doctors at the Salpêtrière believed that hysterical inmates could be hypnotized and bombarded them with flashing lights...
...hoping to induce calm trances or to trigger more positive neurological manias and feelings of delirium.
These attempts were documented by Jean-Martin Charcot before the controversial treatment was pushed to the medical fringe.