Ancient method of treatment

mental illness
Psychology from past to present
 Madness and civilization: M.
Foucault
• From leprosy/ plague to madness Isolation/
confinement was one of the defining feature
to treat those deceases which are contagious.
• Interestingly after curing leprosy and plague
the western experience reveals that madness
is also catches from one person to other.
 What to do???
• If there is no ultimate therapeutic protocol
available to cure the disease.
• A) Use or apply available methods on the basis
of hit and trial. Wrong methodological
interventions transform the disease. That will
make the disease worst.
• B) Go for therapeutic adventures. Generally
we lose the patient ( the patients were killed
do to experimentation)
Strategies included hospitalization, isolation,
and discussion about an individual’s wrong
beliefs. “Despite its limitations, its respectful
treatment of people with mental illness and its
efforts to meet the basic needs of these
people, albeit through asylums, had a
transformative impact in Western Europe,”
said Dr. Krystal, who wrote an article,
"Psychiatric Disorders: Diagnosis to Therapy,”
One of the few psychiatric treatments to
receive a Nobel Prize, the lobotomy is also one
that is now used infrequently. “Lobotomy was
the first psychiatry treatment designed to
alleviate suffering by disrupting brain circuits
that might cause symptoms,” Krystal said.
Experts soon realized, though, that the
procedure wasn’t effective enough to justify its
risks.
• The Ancient Greek physician Claudius Galen believed
that almost all ills originated in out-of-balance humors,
or substances, in the body. In the 1600s, English
physician Thomas Willis (pictured here) adapted this
approach to mental disorders, arguing that an internal
biochemical relationship was behind mental disorders.
Bleeding, purging, and even vomiting were thought to
help correct those imbalances and help heal physical
and mental illness.
• Hajama, leaching
•
• one of the earliest forms of treatment for mental
illness, trephination, also called trepanation, involved
opening a hole in the skull using an auger, bore, or
even a saw. By some estimates, this treatment began
7,000 years ago. Although no diagnostic manual exists
from that time, experts guess that this procedure to
remove a small section of skull might have been aimed
at relieving headaches, mental illness, or presumed
demonic possession. Nowadays a small hole may be
made in the skull to treat bleeding between the inside
of the skull and the surface of the brain that usually
results from a head trauma or injury.
• Mystic Rituals: Exorcism
Exorcism
• misunderstanding of the biological
underpinnings of mental illness, signs of mood
disorders, schizophrenia, and other mental
woes have been viewed as signs of demonic
possession in some cultures. As a result,
mystic rituals such as exorcisms, prayer, and
other religious ceremonies were sometimes
used in an effort to relieve individuals and
their family and community of the suffering
caused by these disorders.
• Deliberately creating a low blood sugar coma
gained attention in the 1930s as a tool for
treating mental illness because it was believed
that dramatically changing insulin levels altered
wiring in the brain. This treatment lasted for
several more decades, with many practitioners
swearing by the purported positive results for
patients who went through this treatment. The
comas lasted for one to four hours, and the
treatment faded from use during the 1960s.
 Meeting ID738 4530 1616
SecurityPasscode ZU8jtG
• the understanding of mental illness evolved, some
practitioners came to believe that seizures from such
conditions as epilepsy and mental illness (including
schizophrenia) could not exist together. So seizures
were deliberately induced using medications like the
stimulant metrazol (withdrawn from use by the FDA in
1982) to try to reduce mental illness.
These seizures were not effective, nor were the
outcomes of the treatments. (Researchers later
realized that epilepsy and schizophrenia are not
mutually exclusive.) This field of seizure-related
therapies later led to the more effective study of
electric shocks and ECT.
• he Ancient Greeks had observed that a period of fever
sometimes cured people of other symptoms, but it
wasn’t until the late 1800s that fevers were induced to
try to treat mental illness. Austrian psychiatrist Julius
Wagner-Jauregg (pictured here giving a lecture to
students) infected a syphilis patient with malaria and
the resulting fever cured the patient of the psychosis
caused by his syphilis. Other diseases have been used
to trigger brief fevers for the treatment of mental
illness, according to an article in the June 2013 issue of
The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.
• Asylums were places where people with mental
disorders could be placed, allegedly for treatment, but
also often to remove them from the view of their
families and communities. Overcrowding in these
institutions led to concern about the quality of care for
institutionalized people and increased awareness of
the rights of people with mental disorders. Even today,
people with mental illness might experience periods
of inpatient treatment reminiscent of the care given in
asylums, but society exerts much greater regulatory
control over the quality of care patients get in these
institutions.
 From abnormal psychology to normal
psychology
• From cure to control.
• Discipline and Punishment by M. Foucault ( An over-view).
• 1) Pre- modern , Ancient Europe: very few people were mentally sick AND THEY HAVE BEEN
ABSORBED BY THE SOCIETY AS PART OF SOCIETY., why it was the case???
• 2) Because the life was not very discipline and rationally organized. The availability extra-
discipline spaces.
• 3) As the process of progress started --- people start disciplining people in a more organized
level , dead lines , timings, work hours, starting or finishing points, education , service sector
starts growing, ---- those who were mentally slow , emotional, sensitive , shy , but not mad
were identified as Burdon for society. Such people have been isolated.
• 4) The number of mentally sick people were started growing --- actually who were consider
as mentally sick – those who failed to adopt discipline. This growing numbers of sick people
have questioned the absorbing capacity of society, THEY HAVE not BEEN ABSORBED BY THE
SOCIETY AS legitimate PART OF SOCIETY.

• 5) These mad people were pushed towards the country sides and left unattended.
 Commercialization and madness
• 6) Commercialization process get intensified land ownership problematized therefore the existence of
mentally sick country sides were also identified as threat to private property.
• 7) The ship of fools were pushed all the mad people were pushed into the ship of fools and send to the
open sea.
• 8) After the growth of enlightenment confinement centers were built were all the unaccepted people of
society of were confined . Including criminals , vagabonds, poor, unemployed , mad.
• 9) the mad people were different from the rest of unaccepted people. Because the rest of the unaccepted
people like criminals , vagabonds, poor, unemployed can be reform or reintegrated to society but not the
mad people.