As time goes on, diseases of the mind are being taken much more seriously than they were in even the recent past. Viable treatments for depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia now exist, and lives are being saved every single day thanks to modern science.
A mental ailment is no less serious than a physical one. The diseases are different monsters to tackle, but patients of both can be helpless to the perils. Taking the seriousness of mental illness to heart is extremely important.
However, before people understood the complexity of the mind, some pretty bizarre and sometimes frightening treatments were widely accepted and performed around the world — often on folks who didn't even suffer from mental illness.
These 10 "treatments" and vintage therapies from the past are all so ridiculous that it will make you grateful for the incredible progress we've made. Getting treated for ailments today may not be pleasant but they sure beat the procedures of the past!
Remember that if you know someone who might need help, don't ignore their symptoms! Do what you can to get them on the road to a healthier future.
Please SHARE these "cures" of the past and rejoice in how far we've come since then!
[H/T: Neatorama, Everyday Health]
Thumbnail source: Wikimedia Commons
1. Lobotomy
This procedure, which involved cutting the connections in the frontal lobe of the brain, was popular for about 2 decades. Dr. Egas Moniz of Portugal came up with the idea to perform surgery on humans with suspected mental illness after seeing it successfully calm down a monkey that had previously thrown feces around in a rage.
Dr. Walter Freeman took the procedure to America in his "lobotomobile," performing surgeries on the road, which were often not sterile.
Lobotomies left the patient calmer for sure, but that's because their self-awareness and their ability to process feelings and facts were basically gone.
2. Marriage
In the Middle Ages, hysteria was most often treated by prescribing marriage, regular intercourse, and having babies, to tame the "wandering womb" that both Hippocrates and Plato believed in.
Hysteria, of course, is not a real thing, and we now know that it could have been any number of issues from depression to post traumatic stress syndrome.
Other treatments for the wandering womb and hysteria were putting bad smelling things by a woman's nose to scare the organ into behaving and good smelling things by her genitals to lure it closer to its proper place — yikes.
3. Malaria Therapy
The mental side effects of neurosyphilis used to be treated by infecting the patient with malaria.
Dr. Julius Wagner von Jauregg of Austria hatched this idea in 1917 and won the Nobel Prize for it in 1927. The extremely high fever would kill off the bacteria causing syphilis, so it technically did work, but it was incredibly unpleasant.
Even though this treatment was quite unsettling, many at the time considered it better than dying from syphilis.
4. Spinning
Rotational therapy first came about in the 1700s from Erasmus Darwin (pictured above), Charles Darwin's grandfather. A physician, philosopher, and psychologist, he wasn't thought to be very good at any of them, and his rotational therapy was written off as nonsense.
Then, one of America's founding fathers, Dr. Benjamin Rush, adopted the technique as a way to unclog the congestion in the brain that caused mental illness, and patients were made to sit in chairs that spun around like a carnival ride, leaving them dizzy and nauseous, not cured.
5. Drilling
Trepanation dates all the way back to ancient times. It was a procedure in which a hole was drilled or scraped from a patient's head to let the evil spirits out and relieve them of mental illness.
6. Comas
In 1927, patients with schizophrenia were given daily injections of insulin to initiate comas for several weeks. This was called insulin therapy, and it was masterminded by Manfred Sakel, an Austrian-American psychiatrist.
Once safer and more effective medication came around, comas were certainly no longer used as a "cure."
7. Vomiting
Claudius Galen was a prominent figure in the Greek and Roman Empires who believed that almost everything that could possibly go wrong with a human was due to the four humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
As a result, vomiting was a supposed way someone with a mental illness could readjust their humors to achieve well-being.
8. Water Submersion
Hydrotherapy was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hot water was utilized to treat things like insomnia and sometimes lasted for days to try and get the person to sleep, while cold water and sometimes even ice baths were used to treat manic depressive or overly-stimulated patients in order to decrease blood flow to their brains.
This practice had no real positive effect on a mental disorder at all.
9. Seizures
Metrazol convulsive therapy was invented by Ladislas J. von Meduna in the early 1900s. Inducing seizures in patients with schizophrenia did actually yield pretty encouraging remission percentages in his patients.
However, the side effects were soon deemed way too harsh, and electroshock therapy was used instead to stimulate the same areas of the brain.
10. Isolation
Asylums from the 15oos to the 1800s were hardly a place to actually treat the mentally ill. They were more of a place to keep these poor folks out of sight of their families and society than the hospitals we have today.
Patients would be kept in isolation, and in some extreme cases, they were chained to the wall so that they couldn't even lie down to sleep.
One infamous asylum was Saint Mary of Bethlehem in London, where their most unwell patients would be put on display for the entertainment of the public.
Did you know any of these treatments from the past? Let us know if we missed any from our list, and please SHARE with family and friends!
