Treatment

=Mental Disorder Treatment in The 1930s and mid 1900s=

The world has only recently developed a good understanding of mental disorders and how they should be dealt with. Not all that long ago the mentally ill or unstable were greatly misunderstood and mistreated. When people first began to recognize mental disorders and disabilit ies it was thought best to remove them from society entirely and house them in Mental houses, to keep them safe and away from the world. Respectively this was safer for the mentally ill who were misunderstood by the world around them and it was safer for the world around them, who the mentally ill could not understand. The people who stayed at these mental institutions were largely kept in solitary confinement. This was not done as a punishment, but simply because they were misunderstood. It was only in the later 1800s and early 1900s that proactive measures were made to ensure that the mentally ill would be treated fairly and humanely. Later on, in the 1930s and mid 1900s it became a popular idea to believe that these mental disorders could be easily treated and, unfortunately, the techniques used were unintentionally macabre. Some of the first to come into popular practice were known as insulin shock therapy and surgical technique of prefrontal lobotomy. Insulin shock therapy used medications to induce a comatose state and then used other medications to - hopefully - lift it. The idea was that it would reset the brain and cause it to work 'normally' again. While most patients did show dramatic results and improvements after a successful insulin shock they would often revert within a few weeks or months. Due to strong chance that a patient would not wake up from the induced coma, this is no longer practiced. Prefrontal Lobotomy is a very gruesome practice where the front of the skull would be cut out and a section of the prefrontal lobe of the brain would be removed. This would leave the patient in a very childlike state making them more cooperative and less prone to violence. Later, Gottlieb Burkhardt, a psychiatrist with almost no experience in surgeries, developed a quick and efficient way to perform lobotomies with two ice picks and approximately five minutes. The practice of lobotomization has been completely been removed from legal treatment of mental disorders as it is considered incredibly inhumane, reducing the patient to little more than a vegetable. These are but two among many medical treatments that mark the 1900s. However, it must be understood that, contrary to modern horror films, these treatments were not practiced with the intention of torturing mental health patients, at the time it was actually believed and accepted that these practices helped the people in need. Those who performed them truly had a desire to aid their patients. It was only after new, safer methods of treatment were developed that these were abandoned and deemed inhumane. So, while many of the treatments from the 1930s are quite grotesque by modern standards, it did mark a time of development for mental health research and understanding and was a necessary milestone in the road to get us to the point we are at today.