Throughout history people have tried weird and wonderful ways to stay healthy.
The Aussies said that sitting inside a dead whale carcass would cure rheumatism; the Ancient
Egyptians used alligator dung as a contraceptive (yes, really); the Victorians encouraged people
to eat tapeworm eggs to aid weight loss.
The Romans whitened their teeth with urine – morning breath is bad enough, never mind
piss breath.
Yet as long as there has been physical illness, there has also been mental illness.
And as long as there has been mental illness, there has been a variety of highly disturbing,
so-called ‘treatments’ that make Harold Shipman seem about as deadly as a damp flannel.
In the 1800s field of psychology began to emerge and the idea that the brain should
be treated differently than the body.
Psychology soon diverged into three main schools of thought: phrenology, psycho-physics, and
moral therapy.
Now phrenology is a since-discredited field which basically involves studying lumps and
bumps on the skull to try and predict a person’s personality or character traits.
Scientists figured that the brain was like a muscle, and therefore parts that were ‘exercised’
more would grow more, and so bumps were a sign of well-developed brain tissue.
Based on that logic Jay Leno should be the smartest man alive.
Phrenologists would map the skull into different sections, each responsible for a different
attribute - for example, the bit above the ear could tell you how self-destructive a
person was, and the very top of the crown was linked with confidence levels.
In fact, the phrase “you should get your head examined” comes from this practice.
The problem was that scientists still had a pretty poor understanding of what parts
of the brain controlled different aspects of behaviour, and so the theory was dismissed
by the mid 1800s.
I mean, just look at this phrenological mental map, it looks like a paint-by-numbers of Gwentyth-Paltrow’s
bullshit marketing terminology.
By then, scientists had moved onto psycho-physics, which wanted to explore the link between the
physical world and mental experience - for example, how does light make something bright?
Or how does sound make something loud?
Wilhelm Wundt – who has the most german name since Volkswagen – is nicknamed the
‘father of psychology,’ by those who aren’t so fond of Frued and incest.
Wundt was a pioneer in this field - he would collect data by recording patient’s responses
to different stimuli, for example showing them different colours.
Wundt and his contemporaries assumed that if you could control the conditions in a laboratory,
then you could control a patient’s reactions.
This problem is, experiences are subjective - for example, it’s presumed not everyone
sees colours as the same hue – your red could be my blue.
And take music – Beethoven’s 9th fills me with wonder and serenity but it turns Alex
DeLarge into a quivering, feeble fetus.
Psycho-physics taught us a lot about how we experience things, but didn’t really tell
us why people experience things differently.
Lastly, the Victorians practiced moral therapy, the belief that people with mental disorders
could be cured by offerings of compassion, kindness and dignity.
Various religious groups, including the Quakers, argued that the asylum system needed to be
reformed so it was more sympathetic towards patients, who should not be seen as raving
animals, and chained up, as was typical, but vulnerable human beings.
Part of reforming the system involved redesigning the buildings in which patients were housed;
this is the period where all those asylum hospitals you see in movies like One Flew
Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shutter Island were built - imagine grand buildings with
gardens where patients could get some fresh air.
In America Dr Thomas Story Kirkbride advocated the use of architecture as part of the cure
and not just a prison for the afflicted.
So he designed a blueprint for the ‘perfect asylum’ - one that would enable patients
to be classified by type of illness but also enable easy surveillance, with ample sunlight
and ventilation.
Between 1845 and 1910, 73 Kirkbride plan hospitals were built, and many still exist today.
Now moral therapy, which we mentioned earlier, advocated that these institutions needed to
offer a safe space for vulnerable people, and should only be used as a short-term solution.
But in reality, budget constraints, overcrowding, poorly trained staff and dubious psychiatric
knowledge resulted in a very different system.
Most asylums functioned as glorified prisons, a place to keep individuals with mental illnesses
away from their families and communities, because they were seen as a threat.
The problem was anyone who exhibited ‘abnormal behaviour’ was deemed a lunatic, and, as
anyone who’s ever endured reality television will tell you, the term normal is rather subjective,
leaving the system wide-open to abuse.
For example, many inmates were simply political prisoners, people who’d expressed radical
views and so were conveniently dismissed as mad and locked up.
Women were particularly vulnerable to misdiagnosis and were institutionalised much more frequently
than men.
At the time a woman’s assets automatically passed to her husband upon death or incarceration,
and so lunatic asylums offered a nifty way to get rid of an unwanted spouse and make
a quick bit of cash.
The law also stated that any man in charge of a woman - so a father, husband or brother
- could have a woman detained against her will, and many women who spoke out against
female oppression were deemed hysterical and dangerous by those closest to them.
In 1887, a pioneering journalist Nellie Bly heard about the mistreatment of female inmates
at an insane asylum in New York, and decided to go undercover, by acting insane to have
herself committed, to find out if the rumours were true – the following year Bly would
recreate Phileas Fogg’s fictional trip around the world in a record breaking 72 days, so
it’s fair to say she was prepared to go the distance.
In the asylum she discovered conditions more cruel and inhumane than she could have ever
imagined.
Patients were forced to consume spoiled food and contaminated water.
They were tied together and forced to pull carts around like mules.
Sometimes they were made to sit on hard, wooden benches for up to 12 hours a day, and if they
moved, or made a noise, they would be beaten.
Throughout the nights she heard constant screams harrowing down the long, empty corridors.
One woman repeatedly begged for her death whilst another bellowed ‘murder’ over
and over.
Bly also saw one of the nurses beat a patient with a broom-handle for crying.
Then, they tied her up, covered her face with a sheet and bound it tightly around her neck
to subdue her screams and placed her in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water.
Nurses and orderlies then held her in the tub until she gave up struggling and lost
consciousness.
What she witnessed was known as Hydrotherapy – a common ‘treatment’ for patients
experiencing manic episodes.
Doctors believed the shock of cold water would help to reset patients’ systems.
People were sometimes submerged in a bath for hours at a time, ‘mummified’ in cold
wet sheets, or handcuffed to a shower and sprayed with icy water.
The Victorians were so convinced about the benefits of hydrotherapy they invented all
sorts of strange contraptions to give you a good soaking at home; like this rocking
bath tub, which was basically your very own wave machine, or the ‘bath of surprise’,
which could dunk you into ice water at any moment, and probably explains why most people
don’t like surprises.
What shocked Nellie Bly the most was the fact that most of the patients she met were not
suffering from mental illness before they arrived at the asylum.
But many had since experienced grave psychological trauma because of their treatment.
Now, Bly’s report did lead to an investigation and improved conditions, but this barely scratched
the surface of what was going on behind closed doors.
Harriet Martineau, a British writer who is known as the first female sociologist, wrote
how in asylums, “we see chains and strait-waistcoats, three or four half-naked creatures thrust
into a chamber filled with straw, to exasperate each other with their clamour and attempts
at violence, or else gibbering in idleness or moping in solitude.”
Which does not sound like a fun Saturday night.
When you think of insane asylums you might think of padded rooms and straight jackets,
but the Victorians were much more creative than that.
They used manacles, harnesses, coffins, coercion chairs and crib beds to confine and subdue
patients.
Some institutions forced patients to wear Hannibal-Lector-style muzzles – but rather
than fava beans and a nice chianti, they got freezing baths and a neck collar.
Unsurprisingly, a very high number of people died in asylums.
In 1829 William Scrivinger, a patient at Lincoln Asylum, was found dead from strangulation
after being strapped to his bed in a straitjacket and left overnight without supervision.
Doctors conducting the post-mortems discovered a worrying trend in asylum deaths: patients
kept dying with broken bones, and broken ribs in particular.
Many former patients wrote letters to authorities about the abuses taking place, such as orderlies
subduing patients by kneeling on them until they gave up.
Eventually, an investigation in 1887, resulted in a new legal precedent that asylum patients
who died with broken ribs should be treated as a manslaughter case.
Subsequently, orderlies were taught to restrain patients more humanely.
Now given that people could be sectioned for just about anything and everything, asylums
became overcrowded very quicklySo mental health professionals – if you can call them that
– were under increasing pressure to come up with ways to cure patients quickly, to
have them dismissed and thus free up room for the next unfortunate souls.
This led to a lot of trial and error, which was, well, mostly error.
One of the most downright bizarre was rotational therapy which posited that subjecting someone
to excessive centrifugal force should cure their crazies.
Patients were spun round and round at high speed in a circular motion, normally in a
swinging chair, until they eventually calmed down and promised to obey the doctors.
At this point they would be released and allowed time to sleep and recover – as well as probably
vomit and change their trousers.
The pioneer of this so-called ‘treatment’ was none other than Erasmus Darwin, Charles
Darwin’s grandfather.
Erasmus Darwin was a physician, philosopher and scientist, but unfortunately he wasn’t
particularly good at any of these, and so wasn’t taken very seriously.
Probably because he liked to record his ideas in bad poetic verse like a lovesick teenager,
but it also didn’t help that his ideas included such gems as ‘excessive spinning to ease
brain congestion.’
Nobody paid much attention to Darwin’s idea at first, but then an American Doctor Benjamin
Rush came along who thought spinning the ever-loving-shit out of mentally-ill people sounded like a
marvellous idea.Now, the aptly-named Benjamin Rush claimed that rotational therapy had a
calming effect on his patients, but let’s face it, strap anyone into a spinning teacup
for long enough, and they’ll probably pass out and calm down eventually.
If the ice baths and human salad spinner didn’t cure the old noggin Victorian physicians usually
resorted to chemicals.
In the form of tonics which contained an array of powerful and addictive substances that
would make the FDA cry themselves to sleep, such as morphine, lithium salts, cocaine and
chloroform.
Furthermore, patients who were admitted with syphilis, which was rampant at the turn of
the 20th century, were injected with malaria without their knowledge or consent, because
it was supposed by Austrian doctor Julius Wagner-Jauregg that malaria would kill syphilis
in the bloodstream.
To be fair, it did work to a certain extent in reducing syphilis, the issue was about
15% of patients then died from Malaria – now why does that not surprise me?
I would like to say that mental health treatments improved after the Victorian era, but I’m
afraid it was quite the opposite.
Electric shock therapy was widely practiced in the early to mid 20th century.
And, in 1935, António Egas Moniz invented the lobotomy, for which he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in medicine but all it did was turn people into human vegetables.
By 1951 20,000 lobotomies had been carried out in the US and other countries did their
fair share too.
Funnily enough it was the USSR who were first to outlaw lobotomies in 1950 because it was,
in their words, ‘contrary to the principles of humanity’.
Europe and eventually the rest of the world followed in subsequent years.
And I think you’ll all join me in saying thank goodness for that.
But just to be safe, next time you visit your psychologist and he offers you an iced tea,
just take care and watch what he’s doing with that ice pick.
Thanks for watching.