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.
