Mental

Health in
the late
1950’s
Augusto Spinelli, tomás Procaccini,
León Castro, Tatiana Kunisz and
Camila Sánchez Cavalieri
Table of contents

01 Facilities 03 Treatment

02 Names of the
conditions at that time 04 Comparison with
nowadays
Context
People with mental illnesses
in 1950 were not tolerated in
society, and the belief that
mental illnesses were genetic in
origin generated even more fear.
This consequently led to
mentally ill people being rejected
by their families as well since
they didn't want to be associated
with the illness.
 01.
Facilities
By the 1950s, the death knell
for psychiatric asylums had
sounded. A new system of
nursing homes would meet the
needs of vulnerable elders. A
new medication,
chlorpromazine, offered hopes
of curing the most persistent
and severe psychiatric
symptoms. And a new system
of mental health care, the
community mental health
system, would return those
suffering from mental illnesses
to their families and their
communities.
 Names of
conditions
02. at that time
Anxiety and depression: melancholia
Depression: Hysteria
Schizophrenia: dementia praecox
Intellectual disabilities: Mental retardation
03. treatment
Pyrotherapy (artificial fever) is a
method of treatment by raising
the body temperature or
sustaining an elevated body
temperature using a fever. In
general, the body temperature
was maintained at 41 °C. Many
diseases were treated by this
method in the first half of the 20th
century. Fevers were used to treat
melancholy and psychosis.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a
medical treatment most commonly used in
patients with severe major depression or
bipolar disorder that has not responded to
other treatments.
ECT involves a brief electrical stimulation
of the brain while the patient is under
anesthesia. It is typically administered by a
team of trained medical professionals that
includes a psychiatrist, an anesthesiologist,
and a nurse or physician assistant.
The form of psychosurgery known as "lobotomy"
was pioneered by a Portuguese doctor, António
Egas Moniz in 1936. His method involved
drilling holes into the skull -- either from the
sides or from the top -- and injecting alcohol into
the frontal lobes in order to cause sclerosis -- a
thickening and toughening -- of the white matter
there. He later began to use an instrument of his
own design, called a leucotome, to remove six
chunks of tissue from the frontal
lobes.Lobotomies were once used to treat
many mental health conditions, including
schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar
disorder
During the 1950s and 1960s, the
popularity of the benzodiazepines
stemmed from their effectiveness as
remedies for general life stresses and
protean conditions of anxiety, with
little consideration of whether or not
they treated explicit disease states.
These medications are effective in the
control of florid symptoms of psychoses
such as hallucinations, thought disorder
(impaired communication) and
delusions.
THE REST CURE
A new condition like
neurasthenia or hysteria
required a new treatment. The
rest cure was a strictly enforced
regime of six to eight weeks of
bed rest and isolation, without
any creative or intellectual
activity or stimulation. It was
often accompanied by massage
and electrotherapy, as well as a
fatty diet, rich in milk and meat
04. Comparison with nowadays
 Nowadays, mental health is a completely different story.
Previously, with symptoms of depression, they performed a
lobotomy on you, a procedure that, once completed, left you
practically in a vegetative state since you became incapable of
having feelings. now problems like depression are treated
through constant therapy, through which there is a psychiatrist
involved who analyzes you and gives you a diagnosis and helps
you overcome whatever you are going through and medicines
that help you
 Where we
got all the
information
https://www.imhm.org/page-1854827
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-fami
lies/ect
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/obj
ects-and-stories/medicine/nerves-neuro
ses#:~:text=The%20rest%20cure%20w
as%20a,or%20intellectual%20activity%
20or%20stimulation
.
https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/nu
rses-institutions-caring/history-of-psychi
atric-hospitals/
https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/
nurses-institutions-caring/history-of-