Marie Terese Fox

Bedell
CAS137H
11/4/14

The Shift in Mental Health Understanding, Treatments, and Progression

Throughout History
When in a public area, a park perhaps, there is no doubt that there will be people
Around, all different types of people, from all walks of life. Some of those people may
even be injured, on crutches or in casts, but theres something that cant be seen.
Diseases that you cant observe simply with sight, yet one in four adults in the United
State are experiencing, or will experience a mental illness. (nami.org). This number has
skyrocketed in the last few decades, it has started to affect a younger generation also,
and there seems to be no slowing in its progression. While the rapid increase in the
amount of people suffering in the past twenty years is a huge shift in our society, there
has been a paradigm shift in the diagnosis, treatment and explanation behind mental
disorders that can be traced back to ancient times, when Hippocrates first began
treatment that didnt involve religion.
Around 400 B.C. Hippocrates was, from what can be seen, the first person to treat
mental illness as a physiological issue as opposed to a demonic possession, or
displeasure of a higher power. Before this the treatments were crude and violent, and
usually involved a priest or man of god, though there seems to be evidence that the
ancient Mesopotamians would chip holes into skulls to clear the brain of evil spirits,
usually resulting in death. While the methods of treatment have substantially improved
since the ancients, the superstition behind mental illness may endure, and his very
possibly is where the negative stigmatism stems from in the modern world.
The Middle Ages carried on with many of the same religiously-based treatments as
the earlier generations did, though they also took to burning many women at the stake
and branding them as witches. Many mentally ill were kept in the custody of their
families, and treated like animals. It was common practice to restrain and abuse those
family members, this was especially prevalent in Christian Europe. Here there is
another factor lending to the modern idea of mental illnesses. Where it became
important to marry children into families of respect, no one wanted their family to be
attached to someone who was immoral in the eyes of God and tainted with the curse of
mental disabilities. This was crucial to the treatment of the sick in The Middle Ages, and
the lack of advancement. The only true progress in this time period came from Muslim
Arabs whose asylums had been traced back to almost the eighth century, and
techniques mirrored that of the Greeks scientific approach.

The next few hundred years have few improvements or solutions in the field.
Medically there were few enhancements, the most common being bloodletting, which
was the prescribed treatment for almost all illnesses at the time. Asylums begin
establishing themselves all over Europe, though the conditions resembled jails as
opposed to any real medical facility. There true purpose was to relieve families of the
burden they presented and were usually treated similarly to how their family treated
them, only in mass numbers. One of the most famous asylums in London England was
later nicknamed Bedlam, after putting their more violent patients on display for the
general public to pay to see. Every hundred years or so, the care of the affected was
brought into question and analyzed, resulting in minimal fixes, such as chains and
shackles being banned in France in the eighteenth century. All of the minimal advances
led us to nineteenth century America, where the stigmatism and mistreatment of
patients prevailed quite overwhelmingly. The first real advancement takes form in
Dorothea Dix. After observing the dismal conditions that were forced upon people she
spent forty years lobbying for better facilities and got enough funding from the
government to build thirty two state psychiatric hospitals across the country. The main
platform Dix developed, called The Mental Hygiene Movement, was rooted in the ideals
that patients residing in hospitals and being treated by professionals was the most
effective treatment for recovery. Unfortunately, this success was short lived. In the late
eighteen hundreds the hospitals were under funded, under staffed, and over-crowded.
Many reports started flooding the papers with word of the mistreatment, and one
journalists went so far as to be admitted to an asylum to have an accurate and thrilling
account. With the hospitals being discredited the government boosted funding, hoping
to reinstate the original fundamentals the facilities were built on and to quiet the outcry
of the population.
We find ourselves at the turn of the century and the major advancements in
psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud begins using talking cures, speaking with patients and
using the information he collected to make further advancements in the field. Sigmund
Freud will later become one of the most notable names in psychology, after publishing a
series of books on his Psychoanalytical Theory. Even with Freuds discoveries the
mentally ill were still considered outcasts, even pariahs, and a taboo of the subject
continued to resonate throughout society.
Unfortunately, Freuds findings werent universally accepted in the science
community and they would turn to more violent methods to cure the inflicted.
Electroconvulsive therapy started to gain momentum along with other somatic
treatments, such as psychosurgery. Many are put into insulin induced comas to treat
schizophrenia and the lobotomy makes its first appearance, and will be used for two
decades to treat anxiety, intractable depression, and schizophrenia, with absolutely no
success. While lobotomies were found to be less than useful at the expense of many
peoples lives, electroconvulsive therapy is discovered to make a significant difference
in patients suffering from depression, but the method is used more often to bully,
threaten, and injure patients then it is to heal.

Luckily psychopharmacology gained much more popularity due to J. F. J. Cade

introducing Lithium in 1949 as a drug treatment, while it didnt eliminate psychosurgery
by any means, there were now some other options for treatment. After Lithium made its
appearance other anti-psychotic medications start to become more popular. None of the
available drugs healed anyone suffering from a mental illness, but they did help lessen
or control symptoms. Just as these drugs were beginning to be made available, the
amount of patients in mental institutions in America peaked at 560,000 in 1955. This is
partly due to the newly implemented idea that phobias can be treated with behavior
therapy. But the high numbers of patients wouldnt last long after this point.
The 1960s brings about the beginning of the end for the mental institutions. The
amount of patients drop from the 500,000 to just under 130,000. The new medications
lead many people to believe that they can handle living on their own, this and the dream
that there would be local community facilities to be implemented in the future if anyone
would be of need. This dream proved to be unfounded. Most people who needed the
help did not seek it out, and by the 1980s it was believed that one third of the homeless
were seriously mentally ill.
By the 1990s new medications were introduced and proved to be much more
effective in the treatment and not just treating symptoms. Yet these new drugs did
nothing to stop the rapidly rising numbers that would come along just years later. In the
next two decades to come, anti-depressant use would increase by 400%, the average
age for depression to begin would drop from 29 year olds to 15 year olds, and suicide
would become the tenth leading cause of death, above homicide. The ongoing change
and improvement of the treatment and diagnosis of mental health can be easily traced
and explained through history, but the recent and drastic increase in the amount of
people suffering is a different story.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death in people aged fifteen to twenty four.
Schooling age. Theres been some speculation whether the stress and responsibility on
this generation is simply too much for todays kids. Another theory is that we have better
access to diagnosis then any generation before, that these problems have always been
present but the resources to name them havent been. Many of the older generations
claim that the millennials are too sensitive, that they dont have what it takes to survive.
Is that it? Has this generation been coddled to the point of no return? Even if that is the
truth it isnt something to voice aloud. So many people are still ashamed of what they
cant control mentally, because of the still existing stigmatism associated with mental
illness. Through centuries so much has changed for mental health, but the remaining
revulsion for it seems to be permanent.
Perhaps it would be more prudent to study the climate of the world in which the
generation currently suffering was raised. Economically, the past two decades saw a
huge downturn. The crash of Wall Street and the events following led to a recession that
was feared to be mirroring the Great Depression. While it has yet to reach even
remotely close to the devastation of the 1940s, it did change the way the community at

large lived. The children of the millennium were raised with continuous warnings against
overspending, encouraged to live on the bare minimum, to organize needs over wants,
in a way that the generation before did not have to. As interesting as this may be, it
doesnt explain the increase in suicides or mental health decline, in fact it seems to be a
good thing to have a prudent society, mindful of the costs of living. But when this trait
and the cost of education that is deemed necessary to survive, is combined, it may be
the perfect concoction for the increasing anxiety that plagues the generation. Many
people are plunging into a large debt, and even more so are finding it difficult to become
employed in the economic climate. All of this forms a perfect storm. Frugal people are
taking out loans to pay for the lifestyle they want and after college, they have no way to
pay them back because the lack of jobs ensures that they have no income, leading to
anxiety, and depression. Though the economy cant be the only trigger for the shift.
The evolution of technology lends its own influence to the problem. When the
generation being affected so heavily by mental health was growing up, so was the
technology. Suddenly the entire world was connected, everyone was given a completely
new place to explore. The internet offered a place of refuge for those suffering in their
daily lives. In theory it should have been helpful to grow up in the age of technology, but
in reality, it wasnt so perfect. The internet was used as a place of escape, where less
face to face interaction was required, where anyone can find people just as angry, or
just as sad with a few clicks. There were entire websites dedicated to aiding those with
eating disorders continue to starve themselves, no longer did anyone have to vent to
friends or family, the world wide web was there for the taking, allowing people to air their
feelings, without getting any positive or helpful feedback. The internet age led to an
isolation that has yet to be known by any other generation, and it certainly held its part
in the shift.
Mental Illness evolved throughout history. It changed as the human race did, and
was a constant since the beginning of time. And yet, instead of changing for the better
as humanity was thrust into the 21st century, we have fallen to rock-bottom. This shift is
abrupt and devastating, and its cause seems to be the society we worked so hard to
build. The world that was fostered by generations upon generations seems to have a
flaw so large its comical to think we are moving forward. Whats the point of progressing
into the future, if no one wants to live in the present?

Works Cited:

"A Brief History of Mental Illness." Unite For Sight. N.p., 2013. Web.

"Timeline: Treatments for Mental Illness." PBS. PBS, 2002. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.

Horwitz, Allan V. "The Epidemic in Mental Illness: Clinical Fact or Survey Artifact?"
Contexts 5.1 (2006): 19-23. Mental Illness Facts and Numbers. National Alliance on
Mental Illness, 2013. Web. 26 Oct. 2014

"The History of Mental Illness: From "Skull Drills" to "Happy Pills"" RSS. N.p., 2014.
Web. 26 Oct. 2014.

Levine, Bruce. "Why the Rise of Mental Illness? Pathologizing Normal, Adverse Drug
Effects, and a Peculiar Rebellion - Mad In America." Mad In America. N.p., 2013. Web.
26 Oct. 2014.

"Save. Suicide Awareness Voices of Education." SAVE. N.p., 2014. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.