what them poor souls went through without meds, barbaric in a lot of ways
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I can’t imagine that the treatments they received were enlightened or dignified either.
Insulin shock therapy certainly was extremely barbaric. Not to mention lobotomies.
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Who would think now, that Thorazine is one of the greatest breakthroughs in medical history!
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stop it your givin me a head ack. I talked to my older people about it. they say dr were out to get them. or the places ware too full. most toke things we would never think of. just to get normal.
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Come along way with treatment.
The torment n inner n outer torture people have gone through indeed.
Zzzleeping tablets could of gone a long way though.
A good nights sleep can do wonders .
What’s really unfortunate is that we are using medications today which work by the same mechanism as the first antipsychotics from that time period. In other words we have had that little progress. People on this forum are still being prescribed thorazine. Something seriously needs to be done.
Before Thorazine (1952), people with schizophrenia were put in long-term psychiatric asylums and sedated with morphine and scopolamine. To get an idea of the scale of these long-term psychiatric asylums one needs only to look at Pilgram State Psychiatric Hospital (Brentwood, NY), which was once the largest psychiatric hospital in the world, peaking in 1954 with 13,875 patients.
[details=Summary]Thorazine certainly was a seminal moment in the treatment of people with schizophrenia on a pharmacological level, though riddled with negative side effects such as tardive dyskinesia. However, on a humanitarian level people with schizophrenia, and other brain-based disorders, continued to be treated on a sub-human level. Maybe the quintessential example of this was the Willowbrook State School (Staten Island, NY). This “school” mostly housed children with profound mental retardation, but it gives one an idea of the zeitgeist towards people with a brain-based mental illness. Willowbrook State School was exposed to the public in 1972 by a young journalist, Geraldo Rivera, who was working for a local television station in NYC at the time. Rivera’s expose can be found here (warning: extremely disturbing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbiYJkiX-Dg [/details].
Yes, anti-psychotics have been instrumental in the closing of long-term psychiatric hospitals. Moreover, they have significantly improved the lives of people with schizophrenia.
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