Dark ages of mental illnesses Essay

The Dangerous Lunatics and Dangerous Idiots Acts that was held in place until the 1940s meant that all that was needed to lock up a person inside a mental institution was a relative telling the court that the person was insane. There were no built in criteria of who could join the institutions, and mental institutions soon became an easy way to get rid of unwanted relatives to get hold of property or just to get them out of the way.
A bit further back, in the 1870s, mental institutions started a very efficient way of sustaining their institution by having the patients take part in small jobs and benefit their living situation. Mental institutions started received increasing credibility and it became common for jobless, homeless people to join the institutions for food and shelter. With both of these factors filling institutions with patients, the number of patients soon became unsustainable. This provided doctors with insane ideas about treatments with countless people to experiment on and the brutal treatments of the past and a new treatment called the lobotomy was introduced. Although these treatments were dangerous, and often would kill the patients, there were always patients at hand and many times the relatives of the patients would be more interested in solving the problem rather than thinking for what would best benefit the patient.
The first lobotomies included drilling holes on the sides of the skull and injecting alcohol in the brain. Even ignoring the 25 percent death rate, the side effects were extreme and many patients faced different effects going from becoming a human vegetable to having their mental capacity cut down to one of an infant to losing their intellect and long-term memory. Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of the president John F. Kennedy was one of the many people who had been struck with a side effect of the lobotomy. She had the operation done to her because she had been "moody" and "rebellious" during her teen years, and in the end she was left with a mental capacity of an infant and had to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution. Other people who went through this process said that they were "there but not there" and felt "like a freak" and "ashamed".
Besides the lobotomy, the patients were given treatments including forced insulin induced comas, swinging them at high speeds and shock therapies. These "treatments" hardly did any good to the patients and had a high death and brain damage rate.
Even ignoring the actual torture meant to cure the patients, in some cases patients weren't given clothes or were left in the dark. In many cases two or three people were given one bed and there were even documented cases where food was given out with garden forks or where female patients were sexually abused but no action was taken even after it became revealed. Overall the 1930s was a time worthy to be considered the dark ages of mental illness.