Were there schizophrenics in like the 1800s ? How did they manage without meds?
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They got kept locked up by their family in an attic room.
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I read that ppl threw rocks on them, many died as a result. Not sure which year, maybe before 1800s.
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They thought they were possessed by the devil so ppl attached them and threw rocks on them.
Some also died by draining blood thinking the devil or disease is there.
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Bloodletting and exorcisms.
People had no idea what to do back then.
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Horrible stuff. There were asylums and it was horrid.
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Samuel Tuke, and Philippe Pinel were two earlier persons who brought science thought to earlier institutions, and others. There are a list of others somewhere.
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Even 1900’s were probably bad. Up until maybe 1980’s? When were people lobotomized and shock therapy and sprayed with hoses? I am glad that at any point to be alive with sz it’s now in this time period, minus all the crazy crap going on today.
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great question and all gr8 answers here
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They were outcasted or put away in some cultures, while revered as shamans in others.
The brain is a mystery. I think we will never crack it. Some primitive people have accepted this fact but the western culture is so infatuated with technology that it is still trying.
Einstein used to say: “a problem cannot be solved at the same level of understanding where it occurred”. Sz is a brain/mind illness. To understand it, we would need to transcend our current human nature and intelligence. Is that even possible?
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Don’t get me wrong. Drugs have been found, that work well for many. But it was a serendipitous discovery. We still don’t know why they work. In my opinion we can still find better drugs, but it’s a “wild swings in the dark” process.
We have no idea what consciouness is.
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I don’t see why its not possible, scientists already fixed positive symptoms with meds, a step forward from lobotomies and first gen antipsychotics. My atypical ap Risperdal has no side effects at all and stopped all my positive symptoms.
Now its time to find meds for the negative and cognitive symptoms. Its a slow process because sz one of the worst brain diseases but we are progressing.
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They know how they work, the dopamine theory is the most true to date because blocking dopamine fixes positive symptoms while using drugs that increase dopamine like cocaine increase positive symptoms. Another theory is genetics where genes coding for dopamine receptors proteins get mutated.
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You are right. I said “they don’t know WHY they work”. What is the relationship between dopamine, a chemical substance, and hearing voices? Nobody knows.
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Yea they don’t fully know the mechanism but they know a good part. I learned in my psychology courses that sz brains start to shrink in the parietal lobes which are responsible for sensory information processing. For some the shrinking also develops in the frontal lobes which causes negative symptoms because their function is task execution and planning.
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I took 4 psychology and 1 neuroscience classes in university.
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They also sell us bullcrap about how one hemisphere specializes in math and another one in music. Yet people having had one brain hemisphere removed, somehow are still able to process both.
The brain can adapt to a certain degree but will never be as efficient as with two hemispheres.
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No, that’s popular media, not neuroscience.
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Well, until they are able to explain to me in layman’s terms what voices are, how they can be so coherent and realistic and also malevolent, all I’m saying is we got extremely lucky with the drugs we’ve found so far. Cause our understanding of the brain is rudimentary at best.
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