An Article on Psychiatric History

In the middle if the 20th century, a new emphasis on mental illness arose. Before then, psychiatric treatment was not that much regarded, yet it still existed. Nevertheless, in the mid 1900s the field grew tremendously. The numbers of hospitalized mentally ill people in Europe and America peaked. In England and Wales, there were 7,000 patients in 1850, 120,000 in 1930, and nearly 150,000 in 1954 it then peaks at 560,000 in 1955. Several new institutes arose, and so did new treatment methods. In the United States, the number In the U.S. passage of the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act provided the first federal money for developing a network of community-based mental health services. Advocates for deinstitutionalization believed that people with mental illness would voluntarily seek out treatment at these facilities if they need it, although in practice this will not always be the case. 

A new type of therapy, called behavior therapy, is developed, which holds that people with phobias can be trained to overcome them. However the worst new treatments were Electroconvulsive therapy (ECD), and lobotomies. ECD was the giving of electric seizures for therapeutic purposes. But Lobotomies were even worse: a Lobotomy a surgical procedure in which some connections of the brain are cut. These new methods were very radical (not to mention inefficient) and hence extremely controversial. Many argued that these institutions led to no results, that it even may cause further damage the patients.

Now the psychiatric world has changed. Most of the radical treatments have stopped being used by the majority of the asylums. Now, a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs has been introduced. These drugs prove to be more effective in treating schizophrenia and have fewer side effects. Yet a survey of American jails reports that 7.2 percent of inmates are overtly and seriously mentally ill, meaning that 100,000 seriously mentally ill people have been incarcerated. Over a quarter of them are held without charges, often awaiting a bed in a psychiatric hospital. In conclusion, the methods for treating mental illness have evolved from the experimental times of the mid 1900s, yet the demand for treatment has remained the same.