Patients used as lab rats.
Patients, who are not lucky enough to be in psychiatric hospitals, as a rule, remember them with a shudder. However, today’s hospitals for the mentally ill – just a Paradise compared to what happened in such establishments a few decades ago. The few remaining pictures show: in the era of the mental hospital was a real branch of hell on earth.
Restriction of freedom was much stronger than it is now
In the days when effective and harmless sedative drugs did not exist, doctors to calm patients and not allow them to harm themselves and others, used simple and effective, but extremely painful, and often dangerous means. Ropes and handcuffs, locked for days and weeks in cramped little rooms or even in boxes – everything was in motion. Such funds are often further intensified the psychosis of the patient instead of trying to really calm him down – though medicine of that time often had no idea.
In a psychiatric hospital could get a perfectly healthy man
In the late nineteenth century, the list of indications for hospitalization in psychiatric clinic, the US was the habit of Masturbation, immoral conduct, intemperance, excessive religious zeal, fellowship with bad company, as well as reading novels and tobacco use. Involuntary hospitalization was the subject of those horse struck his hoof to the head, who visited the war or whose parents were cousins, brother and sister. Slim a list of several dozen of the testimony leaves no doubt that each of us is somewhere in 1890, being in the USA, could easily land you in a mental hospital.
Patients were treated with the help of machines for whipping
These are the machines a hundred years ago was used in psychiatric hospitals for the relief of symptoms of the disease in the mentally ill. The significant weight of a stick beat a patient over the body from head to toe, the doctors are hoping that it will become easier. In fact, it happened just the opposite – but, again, the doctors did not yet know.
The doctors really believed Masturbation cause mental illness
A few decades ago, doctors were firmly convinced that Masturbation could cause insanity. They quite frankly confuse cause and effect: because many patients in mental hospitals, unable to control himself, was engaged in Masturbation in the morning till night. Watching them, the doctors came to the conclusion that Masturbation causes the disease, although in actual fact she was only one of the symptoms. However, in the past, psychiatric patients were required to wear here are bulky and awkward units, so they couldn’t masturbate. Walking in them was uncomfortable, and sometimes painful, however, despite this, patients of clinics have lived in them for weeks, and sometimes years.
Women in psychiatric hospitals were forcibly subjected to a “vaginal massage”
Surprisingly, at that time, male Masturbation was considered dangerous, women were prescribed it as a medicinal treatment for hysteria. This diagnosis could be delivered to the woman for anything from irritability to sexual desires. As treatment has appointed a so-called “vaginal massage”, i.e., massage of the vagina with the help of special devices with bringing the patient to orgasm. From the patients themselves permission nobody asked – yet, in view of the conditions in mental hospitals were not the worst, though useless, the method of treatment.
Twin cabins is also considered to be a sedative
These boxes are not cells, but special soothing steam baths of the late XIX – XX centuries. Despite its intimidating appearance, nothing particularly wrong with them. In fact, it was the similarity of modern single saunas-barrel, which today can be found in many spas. Doctors believed that this steam calms violent patients. This treatment could even be called pleasant, if not one “but”: as you can see in the picture, patients were put in boxes fully clothed that turned the sauna pleasure in the slow torture.
Women often become patients of a mental hospital than men
Send the woman to a psychiatric hospital a few decades ago was much easier than a man. For this, the most frequently used already mentioned the diagnosis of “hysteria”, under which it was possible to fit anything, even resistance to the rapist-husband. Another risk factor was considered reading, it was regarded by far the woman leads to madness. A lot of the ladies have spent years in psychiatric hospitals only by the fact that, as stated to the hospital records, they found that reading at 5.30 am.
Psychiatric hospitals of former times suffered from overpopulation
With such a huge number of indications for hospitalization it is not surprising that all of the psychiatric hospitals of former times suffered from an excess of patients. Cope with overpopulation, no doubt: people were stuffed into the chamber, as herring in a barrel, and got more carried away from the bed wards and other “excesses”, giving patients the freedom to settle on the bare floor, and for convenience are still chained they chained to the walls. Modern restraints on such a background seems a model of humanity!
The children lived in psychiatric hospitals for years
In the old days, special children’s clinics did not exist, so the little patients suffering from, for example, mental retardation or persistent behavioral disorders, fall into the same clinic, and adult patients, and lived there for years. But, what’s worse, in the mental hospitals of those times had many healthy children. Here lived the children of patients, nurses, single mothers who had nowhere to go with babies and children, left without parents. The whole Horde of kids was brought up, mainly, patients: the medical staff due to a large load just wasn’t time for that. Anyone grown these kids, easy to guess.
Trying to heal a lobotomy, the doctors turned patients into vegetables
Back in the mid-twentieth century many psychiatrists believed the lobotomy feasible means for deliverance of the patient from schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive. This operation looked scary: the doctor introduced through the corner of the patient’s eye the kind of ice pick and punching them thin bone eye sockets, sharp movement blindly dissected nervous tissue of the brain. After surgery the man lost intelligence, he has suffered with coordination, often due to non-sterile equipment began blood poisoning. Still, the lobotomy was considered a cure for schizophrenics for decades: in the US in the early 1950s was conducted about 5000 lobotomy a year.
In a psychiatric clinic could popasti because of sexual orientation
What is wrong sexual orientation a hundred years ago was considered a mental illness, no one, perhaps, is not surprising. It’s amazing how the doctors made a conclusion about sexual preferences, when deciding whether to carry the patient to the hospital. So, in one case, he spent several years in a mental hospital just because he loved to wear trousers and Tinker with technology. Known cases with several women when they were recognized to be mentally ill due to too low of a sexual appetite: asexual ladies in those days believed hidden lesbians, believing that a normal woman in their right mind has the right to just reject her husband!
And the lack and the excess of religion a hundred years ago were in a mental hospital
A hundred years ago in the USA people refused the help of the therapist or surgeon for religious reasons (as it is doing today, for example, fans of Scientology) had a chance instead of the surgery is to go to a psychiatric clinic. But the lack of religious feeling has also been fraught with hit in the nuthouse: there are several cases where people held in homes of sorrow, not one year only because openly declared themselves atheists.
Doctors who treated the psyche, knew almost nothing about her
A hundred years ago, doctors knew almost nothing about the functioning of the human brain, therefore, their treatment resembled more cruel experiments on people. Patients doused with ice water, drilled them to the skull, removed part of the brain, not because the doctors were convinced of the validity of these measures but only in order to understand they work or not. It is not surprising that the mortality rate in psychiatric hospitals of a century ago was perhaps slightly lower than in the plague hospitals.
Abandoned mental hospital today – object for dark fun
Only in the 1970-80-ies of the Western world began to abandon the practice of indiscriminate hospitalization of patients in the “house of mourning” cruel and ineffective methods of treatment. In the 1970s, psychiatric hospitals in the U.S. and Europe have begun to close. On the street were many of these patients, who are unable themselves were to be responsible for themselves. Well, the buildings of the former psychiatric hospitals today – the most popular facilities for young adventurers who searched every nook, looking for traces of the era of the bloody dawn of psychiatry that lasted several decades.
