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It is! Massively so! For example, one of the treatments for schizophrenia in the 1920s/30s was insulin coma therapy. They would inject patients with insulin until their blood sugars dropped low enough to send them into a coma. They were then revived with a glucose injection and this was repeated over a few days/weeks, except there was a risk of brain damage and 1 in a hundred died. And lobotomies were carried out for major depression as recently as the 1970s
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I knew about the lobotomises, but not the insulin stuff. It’s horrendous what used to happen
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It really is. Medicine has moved on so much
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I’m currently watching Ratched on Netflix and that is just shocking. I know it’s a fictional show but the ideas of what constitutes mental illness and the suitable treatments are scary.
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There was a list of reasons for admission to Bedlam hospital in 1810... grief, love, jealousy, childbed!!! It's bonkers!
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But remember they started out as being owned by private people with no registration or formal need to be qualified at all! So the longer they kept people the more they were earning!
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And people paid to gawk at patients, as if it was a circus sideshow
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Oh and don’t forget being epileptic or gay was considered a mental illness and in earlier times you would be considered the be possessed or a witch.