INSANE CURES: Still Crazy After All these Years

Article & Video Link:
http://www.mentalhealthstigma.com/insanecures.html



The Tranquilizer Chair

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"IT WAS A BRILLIANT CURE BUT WE'VE LOST THE PATIENT!"

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Throughout the course of history mankind's treatment of the insane has
been, well, insane! While the day-to-day care of patients could be
cruel, attempts at curing them could be even crueler. Everything from
medieval chiseling of the skull to "let the devil escape" to the
1940's ice-pick lobotomies of Dr. Walter Freeman. In 1276, then Pope
John XXI, who wrote several medical treatises, suggested that eating a
roasted mouse "doth heal frantick persons." In the 16th Century it was
believed that stones in the head caused madness. This belief is
perpetuated in the oft-heard cliche "rocks in the head." Dr. Benjamin
Rush (1745-1813), a pioneer of early American psychiatry, recommended
relentlessly swinging the patient around to "shake out" the madness.
And as the short era of moral treatment introduced by Dr. Philippe
Pinel gradually faded from sight and the politics of forced treatment
once again reared it's ugly head, novelist Charles Dickens wrote:
"Chains, straw, filthy solitude, darkness and starvation; jalap, syrup
of buckthorn, tartarised antimony and ipecacuanha administered every
spring and fall in fabulous doses to every patient, whether well or
ill; spinning in whirligigs, corporal punishment, gagging, continued
intoxication; nothing was too wildly extravagant, nothing too
monstrously cruel to be prescribed by mad-doctors." Perhaps no single
group has undergone more widespread experimentation than the destitute
"mentally-ill" in state-run institutions. A hit-movie recently filmed
at an abandoned state hospital in the city of Danvers, Mass. (Session
9), reveals the severity exacted by it's patients. Surgical tables and
eerie artifacts left over from more than a century of treating "the
mentally-ill" have been left as they were at the hospital, which was
abandoned in 1992. Cast and crew members were overwhelmed by the
buildings disturbing aura. Said one crew member: "the walls there are
very sad, full of hurt, it's not a place that you take lightly."

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"There Are Some Remedies Worse Than The Disease!" (Publius Syrus,
First Century B.C.)

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The Spiritual Key to the Psyche: Nick Jouvanis, the author of this
book delves into the often overlooked importance of the soul (or
psyche) in the process of recovery and healing. It is often stated
that a healthy mind leads to a healthy body (and vice-versa), but the
soul has been discarded as a non-entity. While debate over the
existence of the soul has gone on for centuries, it is this debate
that gradually evolved into and gave birth to modern-day psychology.
Have we come full-circle and has the time come for psychiatry to
return to it's roots?

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Dr. Daniel Oxenbridge (1576-1642) a London physician, employed the
latest methods in 1628 when trying to cure the young wife of a
clothier. First he gave her an enema, then he bled her arms, her feet,
and her forehead. After that, "once every three or four days, I either
bled her or vomited her strongly." He then shaved off all the hair on
her head to which he "applied the warm lungs of lambs, sheep and young
whelps..."

Dr. Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644) a Flemish physician, argued
that water shock - to the brink of near death - could extinguish a mad
person's "too violent and exorbitant form of fiery life." Dr. Jan
Baptista discovered this cure by observing that "many fools who
accidentally fall into water and are dragged out for dead are not only
restored to life... but also to the full use of their understanding."
Even American physicians experimented with the merits of this European
cure. A Delaware physician, writing in an 1802 medical journal, told
of the dousing therapy he'd utilized while treating an insane man
confined at home. Another American physician who used this form of
treatment was a Dr. Willard, who ran a private asylum in a small town
near the border of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Dr. Willard's
technique was described by Isaac Ray, a prominent 19th century
psychiatrist: "Dr. Willard had a tank prepared on the premises into
which the patient, enclosed in a coffin-like box with holes, was
lowered by means of a well-sweep. He was kept there until bubbles of
air cease to rise, then was taken out, rubbed and revived." The idea
was that if the patient was nearly drowned and then brought back to
life "he would take a fresh start, leaving his disease
behind." (Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes &
Treatment of the Insane)

French and British doctors experimented with the transfusion of
sheep's blood into their patients... hoping that the life force of a
docile creature "might tame their mad passions." In France, Dr. Jean
Denis tried it on a patient, with, at first, good results. In England,
on November 23rd, 1667, an "insane" man named Arthur Coga was paid
twenty shillings to undergo the transfusion, receiving up to twelve
ounces of blood from the four-footed beast. "Some think it may have a
good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood," wrote
famed diarist Samuel Pepys. Following the transfusion Pepys noted
that, "he is a little cracked in his head, though he speaks very
reasonably." In January of the following year, back in France, Dr.
Denis performed another transfusion on his patient because he'd had a
"mental relapse". The patient died and Dr. Jean Denis was accused of
murder. Sheep transfusion fell out of vogue shortly thereafter.

Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) is sometimes called the father of
American psychiatry, however, what's conveniently overlooked in
tributes to him is that he also drained buckets of blood from those he
treated and was sometimes accused of killing more patients than the
illness itself. Dr. Rush believed that a physician should try to bring
his patients under control by the sheer power of his will, and if that
didn't work, to use such devices as a strait-jacket, the tranquilizer
chair, cold water, cold air, forcing a patient to stand erect for an
extended period of time and blood-letting from 20 to 40 ounces of
blood at one time which he believed was wonderful for calming mad
people. (Please note that blood makes up 7% of the human body. A
person who weighs 100 pounds has seven pounds of blood, which is 2.2
quarts or 69 ounces. If you remove just one quart of blood or 32
ounces, you effectively remove 46% of the person's total blood
volume.) He put his best hope for a cure in "swinging." Dr. Rush
argued that mental patients should be strapped into gyration devices
suspended from the ceiling by chains, and that attendants should swing
and spin them for hours. He believed that the spinning would reduce
the force of the blood flowing into the brain, thereby relaxing the
muscles and lowering the pulse.

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"I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY
FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN!" Thomas Jefferson

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1. DR. BENJAMIN RUSH'S "TRANQUILIZER CHAIR" (1811)


see actual photo below

The most complete restraint of a patient's every move ever devised. 2.
A board attached to the back of the chair which is made to rise and
fall according to the height of the patient. To the end of the board
is attached: 3. A wooden box lined with stuffed linen in which the
patient's head is held immobile so it cannot move backward or forward,
nor incline to either side. 4 and 5. Chest and belly bands, made of
flat pieces of strong leather, which confine and limit the body's
movement in the chair. 6. Strong leather bands which confine the arms
and hands of the patient to the arms of the chair, thereby limiting
their movement. 7. Pieces of wood which protrude slightly from the
chair to which the patient's feet are confined, so as to prevent their
moving in any direction. 8. A stool-pan (half-filled with water)
attached so as to be drawn out from behind the chair and emptied and
replaced, without removing or disturbing the patient. The chair is
fastened to the floor so as to remain stationary. (Three Hundred Years
of Psychiatry 1535-1860)

Dr. Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828): This is a chapter in the history of
psychiatry that is often overlooked and rarely acknowledged, but
deserves mention because Dr. Gall's classification of mental faculties
is a precursor to the present-day Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (the DSM). Dr. Gall was the founder of a branch of
psychiatry known as Phrenology, a term which was derived from the two
Greek words for mind and discourse. After an extensive study of the
brain Dr. Gall came to the conclusion that its various regions were
correlated to specific mental functions. He reported that the
concentration of fiber clusters indicated the degree of development
pertaining to a particular mental faculty and that the outer
conformation of the skull could be measured to make specific
diagnoses. A phrenological chart sectioning off areas of the brain was
drawn by Dr. Gall identifying the various talents, propensities and
character traits. According to Dr. Gall, he was just a schoolboy when
he first noticed that the most outstanding scholars were those with
"prominent eyes and, even more significantly, certain peculiarities in
the shapes of their heads, the shapes caused by variations in the
development of certain areas on the surface of the brain." After
graduating from the university, Dr. Gall spent several years visiting
schools, prisons, and lunatic asylums, where he studied, felt, and
measured hundreds of skulls. Calling his system a "scientific form of
divination" (comparable to the present-day scientific prediction of
human behavior), he used calipers to discover whether or not a patient
had an "underdeveloped organ of benevolence" or an "overgrown organ of
theft." Early phrenologists classified the bumps on the head into
twenty-six divisions, and read character according to how well or how
poorly the bumps were developed (O.S. Fowler listed 42 divisions). For
example, a large bulge in a particular area of the skull would signify
a sensual nature, an underdeveloped one would signify coldness.

According to Professor O.S. Fowler, leading American phrenologist:
"Phrenology was discovered and established by induction. This is
proven by the entire history of this science as a whole and of each
particular organ and faculty. No part of it rests on theory. In all
its parts and details it is wholly a matter-of-fact science." Today
the science of phrenology is cleverly categorized as a psychic art -
rather than what it was actually designed to be - a psychological art.
Professor Fowler's The Practical Phrenologist notes the following
testimonials in favor of phrenology: "As far as twelve years'
observation and study entitle me to form any judgement, I not only
consider Phrenology the true science of the mind, but as the only one
that, with a sure success, may be applied to the education of children
and to the treatment of the insane and criminals." C. Otto, M.D.,
Professor of Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. "I candidly
confess that until I became acquainted with Phrenology, I had no solid
foundation upon which I could base my treatment for the cure of
insanity." Sir William Elles, M.D., Physician to the Lunatic Asylum,
Middlesex, England. (The Practical Phrenologist: A Compendium of
Phreno-Organic Science, by O.S. Fowler, 1869)

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Between 1906 and 1917, psychiatrist Giuseppe Paravicini dissected
patients at the Mombello Provincial Mental Health Center in Italy and
sawed off their body parts, including heads, arms and ears. In 1980,
the extremely well-preserved bodies of people who had been mummified,
apparently some while still alive were discovered, along with the head
of a woman, an aborted fetus, brains, kidneys, lungs, legs, arms and
ears. ("Il Secolo", Milano, Italy, Feb. 12th, 1980)

Dr. Henry Cotten (1886-1933), acting on his theory that infections
caused mental illness, surgically removed "potentially infected" body
parts. "The insane are physically ill," he stated, arguing that if a
doctor could locate and remove the infection, he could abruptly stop
the lunacy. From this initial site of infection, he reasoned, bacteria
could spread through the lymph or circulatory systems to the brain,
where it "finally causes the death of the patient or, if not that, a
condition worse than death - a life of mental darkness." (Journal of
Dental Research 1, 1919, The Relation of Oral Infection to Mental
Diseases) Between 1919 and 1921 - Dr. Cotton ordered 11,000 teeth
removed from his patients at Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey and
if the patient wasn't cured by his dental work, the doctor surgically
removed parts of the stomach, bowels and/or genitalia. "It was awful
to work there", recalled one hospital employee. "There was a young
girl who worked in the office right by the door where they had to roll
the baskets past that carried the bodies and organs and stuff. One day
she ran out screaming that she couldn't take it any longer." Dr.
Cotten had killed more than 100 patients with his intestinal surgeries
alone. The mortality rate among those treated by Dr. Cotten hit 43%!

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Damaging the Brain to Cure the Patient

According to Galen the ancient Greeks sometimes applied an electric
eel to the body to numb pain, or to the head to alleviate headaches.
The Greek word for electric eel was "narka", hence the word
"narcotics", meaning drugs that numb the pain. In the 18th century
Benjamin Franklin, who sustained two electric shocks himself,
inflicting minor retrograde amnesia, suggested "trying the practice on
mad people." So in 1787, Dr. John Birch, a British doctor, did just
that, trying to cure a popular but suicidal singer suffering from
depression. The more modern pioneer in this field was the Italian
doctor Ugo Cerletti who in 1938 noticed that workers in a
slaughterhouse used electric shock to send pigs into convulsions in
order to make killing them easier. This is what electroshock "therapy"
does to humans. It generates a severe grand mal convulsion of long
duration through the application of 180 to 460 volts of electricity
across the brain (hence Electro-Convulsive Therapy or ECT), frequently
inducing amnesia. During the first World War an electric shock box was
designed for use on German soldiers who were afraid to fight on the
battlefield. Since it's inception, it's very design was a means of
discipline used to enforce the honor demanded of German soldiers. With
this instrument it was not uncommon for German soldiers to be killed,
not by the war, but by electro-convulsive electrocutions.

Between 1939 and 1941, Nazi doctors produced a film called "The
Mentally-Ill" which presented the pros and cons of electroshock and
gassing procedures. Incredibly, this film details the false notion of
curing "the mentally-ill" with electroshock and proposes gassing them
to death as the only other alternative. Following a series of shock
treatments at the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway
lamented: "It was a brilliant cure - but we've lost the patient!!!"
One month after his final shock treatment and a few days after being
released from the clinic, Hemingway committed suicide. In the
introduction to "The History of Shock Treatment", psychiatrist Dr. Lee
Coleman said of ECT: "The changes one sees when electroshock is
administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury
such as a blow to the head from a hammer. In essence, what happens is
that the individual is dazed, confused and disoriented, and therefore
cannot appreciate current problems." In 1970, as he recalled the first
time he had performed ECT on a human being, Cerletti remarked to a
colleague: "When I saw the patient's reaction, I thought to myself,
this ought to be abolished!" While some psychiatrists still deny that
electroshock causes irreversible brain damage and memory loss,
neurologists and anesthesiologists empathically disagree. Studies
between 1979 and 1991 revealed abnormal neurological signs following
electroshock, as well as brain atrophy and enlarged ventricles. This
procedure is still practiced today as a form of involuntary treatment.

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"A hundred and fifty years ago a well-recognized shock treatment
method was to flog or frighten the patient, and in some instances the
results were excellent. Now we do it electrically and we get about the
same percentage of good results, but with some breaking of bones and
memory losses which frightening and flogging never produced. Memory
losses in modern shock therapy may be passed off as infrequent,
limited and temporary - but they are really frequent, they cannot be
limited, and they are usually permanent. I have heard doctors laugh
about them as they laugh about other things in mental patients, but
the losses are serious to the patients themselves. And along with such
losses go changes in general intelligence and personality, but when
these changes are too obvious to be overlooked they are ascribed to
the mental illness with no mention at all of the treatment." (John
Maurice Grimes, M.D., "When Minds Go Wrong", 1954)

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Diagnoscopy

ice-pick man

ECT: treatment

or quackery?

Phrenodiagnoses


Phrenopsychology

safer shocks?

armamentarium

reductionism?

Electric Chair


Insulin Therapy

Shake Therapy

Hunger Cure

Water Therapy

Tranqilizer Chair

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A Reasonable Request in Search of the Validity of Shock Treatment

Confirmation of the claim that ECT is harmless and beneficial can be
easily adduced if those who practice this procedure would themselves
undergo a regimen of "therapeutic" shocks. Whether or not they have a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression or any other diagnosis becomes
a moot point of contention if indeed such treatment is relatively
harmless as they claim. Why is it that ECT's most ardent supporters
are individuals who have never undergone ECT themselves, and yet...
it's most vocal opponents are individuals who have? What could its
supporters possibly know that its opponents don't already know? Surely
such a lucrative practice would justify the old cliche "put your money
where your mouth is!"David @ mentalhealthstigma.com

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The year 1935 marked a return to the medieval art of psychosurgery
with techniques similar to those used 800 years earlier to "drive out
the devil." After drilling two or more holes into the skull, surgeons
inserted into the patient's brain any of a number of various
instruments - some resembling an apple corer, a butter spreader, or an
ice pick - and often, without being able to see what they were
cutting, destroyed parts of the brain. An early pioneer of this
practice, Portuguese neurosurgeon Dr. Egas Moniz, stabbed long thin
blades into the brains of patients who had had holes drilled into
their heads. As fate would have it, Moniz was shot and paralyzed by
one of his lobotomy victims in 1939 and beaten to death by another in
1955. The idea didn't gain much momentum until Dr. Walter Freeman and
Dr. James Watts pioneered lobotomies in America. Dr. Freeman preferred
entering through the eyesocket with an ice-pick. One gloomy October
morning in front of an audience of psychiatrists and photographers a
group of female patients were wheeled into his operating room. After a
brief discourse on the wonders of psychosurgery, Dr. Freeman went to
work. As the first patient was wheeled in before him, he put
electrodes on her temple and shocked her into a faint. He then lifted
her left eyelid and plunged the ice-pick into her head. As he pulled
it out, another woman was wheeled in before him. Again he shocked and
plunged, and so on, until even the director of the hospital near
collapse with nausea left the room. Although it is widely believed
that Dr. Freeman performed his most famous lobotomy on actress Frances
Farmer, extensive research conducted by author Jeffrey Kauffman and
revealed in a book titled "Shedding Light on Shadowland" suggests this
is not so. Before her death at the age of 57, by now desititute, Mrs.
Farmer was quoted as saying:

"Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for
it looms as large and evil as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam.
But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some
force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate
creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying
institutions." By 1955, more than 40,000 lobotomies had been performed
on men, women and children in the U.S. alone, and tens of thousands
more worldwide. Today under the newly-sanitized guise of neurosurgery,
lobotomy advocates such as the Scottish Secretary of Health propose
that lobotomies be performed on patients without their consent.
(Outrage Over Banned Brain Ops in Scotland "The Big Issue" January
22-28, 1998) An article in "Discover" magazine quotes neurosurgeon
Frank Vertosick as noting that: "Finding a paper extolling the virtues
of psychosurgery in today's medical literature is rather like finding
one advocating blood-letting." He equated it to repairing a computer
with a chain saw. (Discover, Oct. 1997) cinemaniastigma@xxxxxxxxx

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Insane Cures: Still Crazy After All these Years

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Dr. Karl A. Menninger, introduction to the "Shame of the States"

"Let a man be taken to a hospital because he has broken a leg, crying
out with pain when he tries to walk, and he will be surrounded by
nurses, physicians and technicians within a few hours, his suffering
eased and his leg so held that it can begin to mend. But let a man's
mind begin to wander or his memory to fail, his perceptions to become
confused or his fears to overwhelm him, and he is likely to be
conveyed in a dilatory fashion through the county jail to the
courtroom and thence to the wards of what was once called the
asylum... In a way, the average man senses the truth of what he is so
often told, that most mental sickness is outside of hospitals, not in.
He realizes that not only do many of his friends and acquaintances
experience emotional upsets and loss of self-control at times, but
that he himself, has such moments... When Mr. Average Citizen is told
by those whom he trusts that anguish and terror and sorrow and pain
continue to burn the spirit and flesh of the mentally-ill, when
perchance he visits such a hospital and observes that the patients
therein do not correspond to his conceptions of insensibility and
bereftness, he is bewildered... at least one out of every score of us
has either been in a hospital for the mentally-ill, is now, or will be
before he dies. Here then is a very considerable proportion of the
people of our country - blamelessly sick, yet neglected, deserted,
mistreated, betrayed by the other people of our country. We
psychiatrists who have been in this field all of our lives think it is
no wonder that Albert Deutsch and others like him become so concerned
about this. It is only perplexing to us that thousands and tens of
thousands of people do not spontaneously rise up and put a stop to
this blot on our civilization. The facts have been put before the
public time after time, but as yet the movement to eradicate this evil
has scarcely begun." (Dr. Karl A. Menninger, introduction to the Shame
of the States, by Albert Deutsch, 1948)

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An American Holocaust: One of History's Best Kept Secrets

Based on figures obtained from the Center for Mental Health Services
in 1994 and statistics obtained from the 1995 Funk & Wagnalls "World
Almanac and Book of Facts" Page 163: Between 1950 and 1964, more
people died in United States federal, state and county "mental
institutions" than the number of Americans killed in the Revolutionary
War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-
American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and
the Persian Gulf War combined.

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Bibliography:

The Practical Phrenologist of Boston: A Compendium of Phreno-Organic
Science, by O.S. Fowler (1869)

Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (1535-1860): A History Presented in
Selected English Texts, by Richard Hunter and Ida McAlpine (1963)

The History of Shock Treatment, edited by Leonard Roy Frank (1978)

Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and
Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness, by Elliot Valenstein
(1986)

An Underground Education, by Richard Zacks (1997)

The Case Against Electroshock Treatment: USA Today Newsmagazine, The
Magazine of the American Scene, November 1998

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring
Mistreatment of the Mentally-ill, by Investigative Journalist Robert
Whitaker, December 2001


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"In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief
exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil
and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which,
though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn
to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to
concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring
too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he may be
able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about
almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but
considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths
which have always been the current coin of thought. The subject of
freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is
certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched
on many aspects of the problem. Each aspect may have been somewhat
over-simplified in the exposition; but these successive over-
simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of
the vastness and complexity of the original." A. Huxley

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In the forward to Dr. Seth Farber's book "Madness, Heresy, and the
Rumor of Angels, Dr. Thomas Szasz, wrote: "For as far back as I can
remember, it has seemed to me self-evident that people who have
knowledge and skill do not need power to coerce others; that people
who have power are "ipso facto" dangerous to others; that, as Lord
Acton warned, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." Aldous Huxley put it more succinctly in his book "Brave
New World Revisited" wherein he wrote: "If the first half of the 20th
Century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may
well be the era of the social engineers, and the 21st Century, I
suppose, will be the era of the world controllers, the scientific
caste system and the Brave New World. Who will then mount guard over
our guardians? Who will engineer the engineers? The answer is a bland
denial that they need any supervision. There seems to be a touching
belief among certain Ph.D.'s in sociology that Ph.D.'s in sociology
will never be corrupted by power." Should a "mental patient" agree
would either or both of these points of view, he or she would be
shrugged off as suffering from paranoia! David at
mentalhealthstigma.com

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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will
know peace." Jimi Hendrix (1942 - 1970)

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Additional Links: Lobotomy - Strait-Jackets - Eight Myths - Help or
Harm - Benzo Debate - Robert Whitaker's Mad in America

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