March 28, 1841, Boston, Massachusetts, Dorthea Dix clutches a bible in one hand and a travel worn briefcase in the other. She glances up at the intimidating brick facade of the East Cambridge Jail as she approaches. A former teacher, now retired thanks to some timely inheritance money, Dorthea has agreed to teach Sunday School to the female convicts housed within. This is a jail so she’s expecting, of course, to find criminals serving sentences for breaking the law. What she finds instead, cold, starved, and practically naked inside dirty, unheated jail cells shatters these expectations. Not everyone housed in the East Cambridge Jail has committed a crime, some are simply mentally ill with nowhere else to go. They are treated as criminals, starved, beaten, chained to the walls, and sometimes sexually abused. They receive no treatment for their mental health conditions. On the contrary, they are likely exacerbated by the abuse and trauma of this godforsaken place. Dorthea simply cannot let this continue. Right then and there, her shoes echoing off the cold tile floor, joining the shrieks and wails that reverberate through the halls, desperation palpable, Dorthea realizes she has found her life’s purpose. 

 

Mental health has been one of the greatest mysteries throughout human history. An illness with an invisible cause, no surgery will fix it, no tonic, no bandage. Is it supernatural? Evil spirits? Demonic possession? Our lack of understanding about the human mind and stigmatization of mental health issues has led to untold horrors throughout time. And while, yes, we’ve come a long way, is it possible the journey has only just begun? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Shout out to my friend O’Anna who suggested this topic. She asked if I had done an episode about mental health and in answering I was like, well yeah sort of. I mean I mentioned it in some episodes, mass hysteria, mad kings, toxic beauty, six wives, Hazel Scott, witches, child migrants, Agatha Christie, A Common Life, cannibalism, Marilyn Monroe… whoa. And I sort of realized that mental health was almost an overarching theme that ties into all of history. O’Anna also informed me that May is mental health awareness month. So we are kicking off May with an episode about mental health - how it’s been viewed, how it’s been treated, and how all of that has evolved throughout time. Also, quick announcement before we get started because I forgot to mention it last week. I was recently a guest on another podcast, first time ever, it was tons of fun. I sat down with Mimi, host of the show Taboo with Mimi to talk about cannibalism. Her show is all about taboos. Each episode is just a candid conversation about taboo topics so, super interesting, definitely check it out. And I know a lot of you enjoyed the cannibalism episode so I’ll link that episode of Taboo with Mimi in the description.  

 

So, mental health, let’s take it all the way back, or as far back as we can at least which happens to be around 6500 BC because this is the first time we see any sort of documentation of mental health issues and the treatment of them. And we have this in the form of cave art and also human remains, skulls, showing evidence of a treatment called trephination. This is where holes are drilled into people’s skulls and sometimes pieces of the skull were even removed. This was sometimes done to treat head injuries, the irony. But it was also considered a treatment for epilepsy and mental illnesses that they thought were caused by evil spirits being trapped in the skull. So I sort of see where this line of thinking comes from. With the head injury, it’s possible there was swelling of the brain so they thought removing part of the skull would, you know, give the brain more room or something. And then, I mean if you believe there are evil spirits in your head I can see how creating a way for them to get out, drilling a hole that they can escape through. I can somewhat follow the logic. Evidence of trephination from 8,000 years ago is the first occurrence that we know of of a medical surgical procedure being done. And this would continue to be used, drilling holes in peoples heads, until the 19th century, mostly for treating head injuries. But way back when we also see it being used to treat mental health issues that were believed to have supernatural causes. 

 

And that brings me to the three theories about where mental illness comes from. According to Ingrid G. Farreras, associate professor of psychology at Hood College in Maryland, there have been three theories throughout history to explain mental illness. Causes are either supernatural, somatogenic, or psychogenic. So supernatural, that’s where you have evil spirits, or a demonic possession, displeasure of the gods, curses, punishment for sins, or even astronomical causes like planetary gravitation or eclipses. This is, I think we can all agree, a pretty archaic way of viewing mental illness. Somatogenic theories suggest that mental issues are caused by physical problems in the body. A displacement of a major organ, an imbalance in bodily fluids, and more recently brain damage or a chemical imbalance in the brain. And finally, psychogenic theories focus on trauma, stressful experiences that have distorted perceptions of reality. No demons, no physical cause, it is all really and truly in your head. So these are the three main theories that we will see over and over again throughout history. According to Farreras quote “the evolution of mental illness… has not been linear or progressive but rather cyclical,” end quote. So it’s not like it went supernatural and then somatogenic and now psychogenic, we’re always going back and forth back and forth trying to make sense of mental illnesses. 

 

The way we determine that a person has a mental illness has also, luckily, changed a lot throughout time. In the past, classifying someone as mentally ill was based on their behavior and whether or not that behavior deviated from social norms and expectations of how someone should behave. Now the problem there, of course, is that social norms and expectations change from place to place culturally. It’s not a set standard thing. It differs based on where you are and who you’re with. The behavioral expectations of, for example, an indigenous person living on a Caribbean Island in the late 15th century are going to be quite different from someone in the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. If you take that indigenous person and you place them in the Alcazar of Cordoba, invite them to a meal, to dine amongst the European elite, you cannot expect their behavior to match the expectations out of context like that. But it would be unfair to judge that as a mental illness. So you can see how this isn’t a great way to classify someone as mentally ill. Farrera says quote “In the past, uncommon behavior or behavior that deviated from the sociocultural norms and expectations of a specific culture and period has been used as a way to silence or control certain individuals or groups,” end quote. 

We see this as justification for the oppression of these people. The majority of indigenous Americans were not mentally ill, however, their behavior did at times deviate from European societal norms, i.e. cannibalism. And, as we know, this was used as justification to enslave them. So, not a great way to gauge mental illness, too many variables, too easily abused. Farrera goes on, quote “as a result, a less cultural relativist view of abnormal behavior has focused instead on whether behavior poses a threat to oneself or others or causes so much pain and suffering that it interferes with one’s work responsibilities or with one’s relationships with family and friends,” end quote. So it shifted from why is this guy acting so weird? That’s not how we do things. To, man this guy’s behavior is dangerous, someone is going to get hurt or hmm she doesn’t seem to be able to get out of bed and face the day, she is really not able function and carry out normal daily life activities. So it’s no longer about social context, now it’s about whether or not that person is personally functioning as a human. 

 

More evidence of ancient awareness of mental health comes from written accounts recorded on papyrus from Mesopotamia and Egypt dating back to 1900 BC. And these reports specifically target women, a type of mental illness in women that was believed to have been caused by a wandering uterus. Yeah. They believed that the uterus could become dislodged and like float around in there and that it could attach itself to other organs like the liver or inside the chest cavity where it would prevent these other organs from functioning properly and somehow cause mental distress. So this is a somatogenic explanation, mental illness being explained by a physical problem with the body, a wandering uterus. And it’s not like they cut somebody open and were like “oh look, her uterus is attached to her liver,” because that doesn’t actually happen, we now know. I think it’s likely that these mental issues were disproportionately affecting women and they were like “well, only women have uteruses so it must be an issue with the uterus. Otherwise it would be affecting men too, right?” And it’s like, well, no dumb dumb, that’s not the only difference between men and women. How bout we compare their lives, hardships, freedom, past trauma, abuse, sense of fulfillment. There’s a lot more at play here. But this wandering uterus idea carries over into ancient Greece as well, who named the condition hysteria after the word for uterus which was hystera. In Egypt and Greece this was treated by using strong smelling substances to guide the uterus back into place. Pleasant odors lured it and unpleasant ones repelled it. So in this way, they’ve given the uterus almost like a mind of its own where it can be like “ew, that stinks, I’m going back down here.” It’s really pretty absurd considering they had no scientific proof that any of this was true but, also, science doesn’t really exist yet, so there ya go. 

 

At some point between 1900 BC with the wandering uterus and 400 BC when something somewhat resembling science will come back into play, we cycle back to the supernatural. Farrera says quote “throughout classical antiquity we see a return to supernatural theories of demonic possession or godly displeasure to account for abnormal behavior that was beyond the person’s control. Temple attendance with religious healing ceremonies and incantations to the gods were employed to assist in the healing process. Hebrews saw madness as punishment from God, so treatment consisted of confessing sins and repenting,” end quote. So supernatural, then somatogenic with the uterus stuff, back to supernatural, and now we’re going to bounce back to somatogenic again with Hippocrates in 400 BC ancient Greece. This is after a long period of believing that mental illness was related to the gods, and evil spirits, and sin, and that people just needed to basically pray it away. Hippocrates and his contemporaries rejected these supernatural explanations and they try to separate superstition and religion from medicine. They at least try to get sciency with it. They are limited of course in their lack of understanding of how the human body works but they do at least try. And they propose that mental illness is caused by an excess or lack of one of the four essential bodily fluids which were called humors. So that’s blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. For example, someone who was temperamental or had anger issues, was thought to have too much blood in their body. So bloodletting would have been used to treat those sort of personality issues where they either used leeches to extract blood or they cut you and placed a cup over the cut which would be heated up to create suction and draw the blood out. So Hippocrates is blaming mental illness on these four humors, these bodily fluids. 

 

He comes up with four different types, different categories of mental illness: epilepsy, mania, melancholia, and brain fever. So let’s break these down a little bit. Epilepsy is a seizure disorder. It can have a lot of causes but what it means is, if you have epilepsy, you have seizures, for whatever reason where your body shakes and convulses. Epilepsy is not a mental illness although it was viewed as one throughout much of history. The convulsions of a seizure were seen as a deviant behavior as opposed to a symptom of a physical illness. So Hippocrates mental illness number one is not even a mental illness at all. But, unfortunately, epilepsy will continue to be mistakenly viewed as a mental illness until somewhat recently, leading to people with epilepsy being unjustly stigmatized, institutionalized, and even sterilized through the eugenics movement. Mania was thought to be caused by an excess of yellow bile and it’s characterized by an extremely elevated and excitable mood, high energy, euphoria. Melancholia on the other hand is depression, severe sadness and Hippocrates thought it was caused by an excess of black bile. The word melancholia actually means black bile. Melas is black and chole is bile. So mania and melancholia are kind of opposites and we see them both in something like bipolar disorder where someone experiences extreme mood swings with both manic and depressed episodes. And then there’s brain fever. This one is a bit of a mystery. It was one of Hippocrates original four mental illnesses but it really comes back with a vengeance during the Victorian era where it starts to appear a lot in literature. According to a JSTOR article by Erin Blakemore, quote “fever didn’t necessarily mean a high temperature to Victorians. Rather, people of the era saw it as a suite of symptoms seated in the brain. “Brain fever” came to mean an inflamed brain—one characterized by headache, flushed skin, delirium, and sensitivity to light and sound,” end quote. Based on the symptoms described and post mortem evidence recorded in autopsy reports, because people were actually dying of this brain fever, it seems most similar to meningitis or encephalitis where your brain becomes inflamed due to infection. But, weirdly enough, we often see characters in Victorian literature coming down with brain fever after an emotional shock or excessive intellectual activity. According to Blakemore quote “overexerted women were thought to be particularly susceptible to brain fever, which was treated by wrapping patients in wet sheets and putting them into hot and cold baths. Women’s hair was often cut off during their illnesses both to lower the patient’s temperature and prevent pesky maintenance issues. This gave female fever victims an unmistakable appearance in an era that prized long locks,” end quote. And I have major problems with this. “Overexerted women were thought to be particularly susceptible to brain fever” which is probably where this myth that it could be caused by emotional shock or excessive intellectual activity came from. It sounds to me like the threat of brain infections, encephalitis, meningitis, were used to scare Victorian women away from any sort of achievement or intellectual pursuit. The patriarchy strikes again. 

 

So Hippocrates is two for four in my mind. Epilepsy, not a mental illness. Brain fever, not a mental illness. Mania and melancholia okay sure. So his accuracy isn’t great but he does do a lot to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness. He did not believe that mental illness was shameful or that mentally ill people should be held accountable for their behavior. At this time, people suffering from mental illnesses were cared for at home by family members. Hippocrates idea of mental issues being caused by an imbalance of the humors will carry through up until the 19th century. Although, Galen, a Greek physician living a few hundred years after Hippocrates is the first to suggest psychogenic causes. He buys into the whole humors thing but he’s also like “well, wait a minute, what if a person’s traumatic experiences and psychological stress have something to do with it?” But this idea is mostly ignored for like, ever. 

 

Actually, it swings back in the other direction during the Middle Ages when, according to Farrera, quote “economic and political turmoil threatened the power of the Roman Catholic church. Between the 11th and 15th centuries, supernatural theories of mental disorders again dominated Europe, fueled by natural disasters like plagues and famines that lay people interpreted as brought about by the devil. Superstition, astrology, and alchemy took hold, and common treatments included prayer rites, relic touching, confessions, and atonement. Beginning in the 13th century the mentally ill, especially women, began to be persecuted as witches who were possessed,” end quote. And if you listened to episode 29 about witches, you know these witch hunts continued for several centuries leading to the execution of 80,000 plus innocent people. 

 

But all this time, there are no mental institutions. Mentally ill people are, if they’re lucky, being cared for at home by family. Those who aren’t so lucky end up unhoused as beggars on the streets, or worse, burned at the stake as witches. It isn’t until the 16th century that we see the first asylums, hospitals for the mentally ill. But the mission of these institutions was not to help them, treat them, cure them, no. It was to remove them from society as undesirables. Farrera says quote “such institutions’ mission was to house and confine the mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, and the criminal. War and economic depression produced vast numbers of undesirables and these were separated from society and sent to these institutions,” end quote. They were protecting the quote “normal” people from those that were deemed unfit for society. One of the first such asylums was the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital in London originally called St. Mary’s of Bethlehem (I’m assuming that name was changed when England became extremely anti-Catholic) but it was better known as “Bedlam,” a term that has become synonymous with chaos. 

 

Bethlem was founded in 1247 actually, way ahead of its time. It’s the oldest mental institution in Europe. According to a History Extra article by Paul Chambers quote “All mental illness, it was thought, could be cured by inducing recurring bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, and by bleeding from the veins. The skin would be blistered with caustic substances and patients would have their heads shaved and be placed in cold baths. This regime would be administered repeatedly and for as long as the [quote] ‘strength would bear’. It inevitably led to deaths,” end quote. In 1676 Bethlem moved from a cramped medieval building to a sprawling, ornate palace-like though hastily built building and it remained the only mental institution in Britain with room for only around 120 patients and a long waiting list for admission. Chambers says quote “ As a consequence, many private ‘madhouses’ appeared around London, some of which were no more than unregulated prisons that enabled families to lock up perfectly sane but inconvenient relations,” end quote. 

 

By the 1700s, Bethlem was simultaneously ahead of and behind the times. It remained the first and only legit mental institution in Britain but a tendency towards nepotism in which sons took over for their fathers and put their friends in powerful positions meant it was a bit stuck in the past. In 1750 a group of medical reformers started St. Luke’s hospital right across the street. The doctor in charge of St. Lukes was adamantly against the barbaric, outdated treatment used at Bethlem and denounced the use of quote “bleeding, blisters, caustics, opium, cold baths and vomits’ in favor of patients being ‘removed from all objects that are known causes of their disorder,” end quote. At St. Luke’s, they believed that there were many different causes of mental illness, not just one. Patients were individually diagnosed and cared for in a clean, calm environment. Another difference is that St. Luke’s did not admit paying visitors. Huh? What? Yeah. For, ever really, Bethlem had charged admission for onlookers to visit the hospital to quite literally gawk at their patients. It was a tourist attraction, a freakshow. According to Chambers, tens of thousands of people were paying to visit Bethlem each year making it a top London tourist attraction, second only to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chambers says quote “For as little as a penny, anyone could gain access to Bethlem’s wards in order to stare at, taunt or abuse inmates.” Wild. Now I’m just imagining someone planning out their trip to London in the 1700s being like “Okay so we’ll head over to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the morning maybe say some prayers and then we’ll do Bedlam in the afternoon, go make fun of those wacko loonies over there, somebody’s got to.” Just nuts. But, because of this, because they admitted visitors, tourists, we actually have a lot of first hand accounts of what it was like inside the Bethlem Royal Hospital. A diary entry written by a man named Ned Ward who visited Bethlem in 1699 reads quote “We heard such a rattling of chains, drumming of doors, ranting, hollering, singing and rattling that I could think of nothing but... [a vision] where the damn’d broke loose, and put Hell in an uproar.” end quote. Ward reports that he and other visitors were able to taunt patients through the bars of their cells, verbally insulting them and inciting them to do or say ridiculous things. Chambers says quote “By modern standards this behavior seems cruel, degrading and counterproductive to the patients’ mental health. However, 18th-century medicine dictated that madness robbed the individual of shame, emotion and reason to the extent that any verbal or physical abuse they suffered could surely have no lasting effect,” end quote. Ferrara agrees saying quote “while inhumane by today’s standards, the view of insanity at the time likened the mentally ill to animals who did not have the capacity to reason, could not control themselves, were capable of violence without provocation, did not have the same physical sensitivity to pain or temperature, and could live in miserable conditions without complaint. As such, instilling fear was believed to be the best way to restore a disordered mind to reason,” end quote. You guys, this was like, not that long ago. I might have to do a whole episode cause it gets just really insane from embezzlement, political corruption, to an alcoholic surgeon, celebrity patients, and a crumbling building worsening already bad conditions, it’s, yeah I could go on and on. I’ll have to revisit this. 

 

Okay except one more thing, apparently when they were actually treating patients at Bethlefm and not just abusing them, they used a type of treatment called rotational therapy that was actually developed by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. And this is where you suspend someone from the ceiling in a chair AKA a swing, which is spun around in one direction 20 to 40 times and then allowed to spin back the other way. And my kids do this on swings right? It’s fun. They want to spin around and get all dizzy so they fall down when they try to walk. Cause that’s fun. But, as a treatment, this was done as a way to evacuate the bowels, bladder, and stomach and make an impression on the quote “organs of sensibility” which was the brain and nervous system. Sooo they are spinning these people so intensely that everything is coming out in both directions which is a horrific mental image, you’re welcome. It was also done to induce restful sleep in the patient much like quote “rocking a baby.” Ummm except no. And they knew it wasn’t like rocking a baby because it was also used as punishment when patients refused to comply. Erasmus Darwin suggested that this torture I mean treatment be done for quote “an hour or two, three or four times a day for a month.” And now I’m questioning the entire Darwin family. Grampy Erasmus is promoting this spinning vomit torture chair, Charle’s half cousin Francis Galton came up with eugenics, the most racist field of half science there ever was, and his son Leonard Darwin drank the koolaid and led the first eugenics conference. Like, is evolution even real? Just kidding guys. Charles, I don’t know man, I respect your contributions but your family’s a bunch a quacks. 

 

We start to see a shift in the way patients are treated in these institutions starting in the late 1700s, thank God. There is a shift away from literally chaining people naked into dark, dirty, cold cells and allowing onlookers to gawk at them, towards well ventilated, well lit rooms, good hygiene, purposeful activity and recreation and, you know, compassion. This is known as the moral treatment era. And we see these new age moral treatment hospitals appearing in America pretty early on where they aren’t as bad, they aren’t like Bedlam. The Friends Asylum in Pennsylvania, the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City. They start moving away from somatogenic treatments like bloodletting and spinning people around in chairs, towards psychogenic treatments like fresh air, sunshine, and going for a walk. That is, until the 1800s when the hospitals became overcrowded and no longer had the space and the staff necessary to properly care for the patients, especially poor patients. This is also when we see mentally ill people thrown in jail with actual criminals because there just isn’t anywhere else to put them. And, I mean if you look at American history, the timeline sort of makes sense. The late 1700s and early to mid 1800s were super traumatic and violent. The Revolutionary war, the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, and the Civil War all happened in less than a century. They literally could have all occurred within a single lifetime. Can you imagine experiencing all of that? And this is well before we had any understanding of post traumatic stress disorder. Not to mention women were being tossed into these institutions for the most ridiculous made up reasons typically by their husbands who mistook any quote “challenging behavior” as a mental illness. Many of these women were not mentally ill. They were just trying to assert themselves, stand up for themselves, at a time when they had no voice and no rights. But that behavior went against sociocultural norms at the time and so they were deemed hysterical and committed to these asylums against their will. It is yet another way that women have been silenced and oppressed. And this is not distant history. This sort of thing was happening well into the early 1900s. 

 

So this is why, when Dorthea Dix arrived at a jail to teach Sunday school to prisoners, she encountered mentally ill patients who were being treated as criminals, because the actual mental institutions were maxed out. This shocking realization prompted her to become a social reformer advocating for state run hospitals that would properly care for the mentally ill. Between 1840 and 1880, she helped establish over 30 mental institutions in the US and Canada. 

 

By the late 1800s, psychogenic treatment shifts back towards somatogenic based on the breakthrough germ theory developed by French chemist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur as in pasteurization. He came up with the theory that food rots, spoils because of microscopic organisms, germs, bacteria, and that these same organisms can cause infection and disease in people. So before this people were like “well there’s no visible cause for this illness, we know it isn’t a wandering uterus at this point, so it must be just all in their head, not physical.” and then Pasteur comes up with germ theory and they’re like, “hold on a second, you’re telling me there are invisible organisms that can make people sick? Well then maybe it is physical and we just can’t see it.” And this issues in the mental hygiene movement.

 

Then they hit a bit of a snag around 1900. Remember how Dorthea Dix worked super hard to reform the state of mental institutions and helped establish over 30 state funded hospitals to care for the mentally ill? And did it at a time when women basically weren’t allowed to do anything, at least not with the threat of brain fever hovering over them for too much intellectual exertion. Anyway, that all kind of falls apart around 1900. So before this senile elderly people, those with dementia or alzheimers were sent to almshouses to be cared for. These were kind of like the forerunners of nursing homes but way scarier. But now, though, we have all these state run, state funded mental hospitals. And local communities see this and they’re like, hmm, if we move these old guys from the almshouses to the state run mental hospitals, the state will deal with it and it takes the burden off of us. And according to the National Library of Medicine, this shift, this moving elderly people to mental institutions led to a 240 percent increase in the number of patients admitted to state mental hospitals from 1903 to the mid 1900s. And with overcrowding, once again, actual effective treatment is sacrificed. The authors of the National Library of Medicine article state quote “The state mental hospitals again became largely custodial care facilities meant to contain individuals who were poor and chronically ill. Despite the promise of forging new scientific advancements with social reform, the psychopathic hospitals did not live up to their early promise,” end quote.

 

Treatment, I mean, when they were actually able to treat people, continued to ping pong back and forth between psychogenic, mental, and somatogenic, physical. The work of Josef Breuer (Yosef Broyer) and Sigmund Freud in the first half of the 20th century pinged it back towards psychogenic with the development of psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, therapy, hypnosis, and the placebo effect to treat mental illness. But then it pongs right back to somatogenic with the development of medications to treat proposed chemical imbalances in the brain. And today psychogenic and somatogenic treatments sort of coexist in a way that suggests we still have very little understanding of how to properly treat mental illnesses, but that’s not from a lack of trying. If anything it seems humans have done too much throughout history to try to quote “help” people who are suffering mentally. 

 

Despite increased understanding of science and psychology, this doing too much really ramps up during the early to mid 1900s. This is the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest era. Mental institutions are experimenting with antipsychotic drugs, electro-shock therapy, and surgery. They are infecting people with malaria, putting them into repeated insulin induced comas, inducing seizures, and performing lobotomies where they cut or remove the connections between the prefrontal cortex and frontal lobes of the brain. And to think, this is the cutting edge stuff. This is coming after thousands of years of trying and failing to understand mental health and we landed on an ice pick through the eye socket. It is really no wonder that mental health problems were swept under the rug throughout history, not discussed, not disclosed. No one wanted to admit that they were struggling with their mental health at the risk of being thrown into one of these asylums, chained to a wall with violent criminals, or forced to undergo experimental medical procedures like a lab rat. 

 

Starting in the 1970s we see the start of deinstitutionalization. And this really came because of new legislation that was passed attempting to protect patients in mental institutions that established minimum standards of care and made it so that patients could not work, right, they couldn’t be expected to help upkeep the facility. Which like, great, that sounds good. But it kind of backfired because the costs of complying with the new standards and hiring more people to do jobs that patients had previously done were staggering and already underfunded facilities could not afford to comply. So a lot of patients were just released without really anywhere to go. A lot of asylums started to close their doors. And this is why there are all of those abandoned asylums everywhere. They just kind of left everything behind. Many of the buildings are considered historical so they can’t be torn down and they’re just sort of sitting there crumbling and attracting paranormal investigators and such. 

 

Today it seems like we’re dealing with more mental health issues than ever before. But it’s really hard to determine whether that’s true, whether mental illnesses are really on the rise, or is it just that the stigma has been lifted and people are actually seeking help when past generations would have kept it hidden. According to an FHE Health article by Chris Foy quote “statistics from the world health organization reveal a 13% increase in reported mental health disorders over the past 10 years. Globally, suicide rates are extremely high among young adults — suicide is the second-most common cause of death reported for those age 15-29” end quote. But Foy agrees that the numbers may have always secretly been this high saying quote “While it’s true that growing numbers of people have a mental illness, this could be because less stigma is attached to asking for psychiatric help.” end quote. 

 

And I think that’s a beautiful thing and something that has only happened very recently. I know Hippocrates was trying to remove the stigma 2500 years ago but it really has taken us until just the past few decades to really achieve that. You can see the difference in generations still alive today. The older folks in our society have so much untreated trauma that they’ve just buried deeper and deeper for their whole lives because they were never allowed to talk about it. They were raised being told to “suck it up,” “toughen up,” “stop crying.” They were never free to express their emotions. Their feelings were never validated. And I’ve seen the shift as an educator and a parent, I’ve seen a very clear shift. At school, all of a sudden, everyone was talking about social emotional learning like it took us this long to realize that the way someone feels at school impacts how well they learn. Talking through this stuff with kids, talking about bullying, and stress, and frustration, and sadness, loneliness, this is all super new. No one was teaching lessons like this when I was in elementary school. They were just drilling multiplication facts and telling us to suck it up. And there’s been a huge shift in the way we parent our kids as well. And I know the older generation rolls their eyes and claims they need a good spanking but I really do think that compassionate parenting, validating the feelings of children, and letting them know that it's okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to let it out is going to make them better adjusted more functional as adults, able to form meaningful relationships and connections with others. 

 

I think a lot of the problems we see in the world today stem directly from us completely missing the mark in how we’ve dealt with mental health, forever. We’ve tried hard. We’ve put in a lot of effort. We did a lot of crazy stuff to try to fix people with mental illnesses, a lot of stuff that just made it all worse. And even today, we have a long way to go. Today doctors hand out anti-depressants and other drugs that mask the symptoms of mental illness without actually treating the root causes. They hand them out like candy and the pharmaceutical companies get richer and richer and richer. We have a long way to go yet but I think we are starting to get there. I think we are finally on the right path. Our minds are our greatest strength as a species. Intelligence is the adaptation that sets us apart from all other creatures in the animal kingdom. With our minds, we have done remarkable things. We have created languages that allow us to express ourselves, incredible art masterpieces, we’ve built impressive monuments and gravity defying structures, we’ve Earth’s atmosphere, we developed the internet, a way to connect all humans on Earth, we created vaccines and antibiotics that have saved countless lives, we unraveled the mysteries of our DNA with the human genome project. It seems the only thing we cannot figure out is the mind itself. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. If you are struggling with your mental health, please know that help is always available. If you are in the United States, you can dial 988 right now to reach someone who is standing by ready to help you. You are not alone and there are many people who care about you, including me. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. Those images are also always available through my website historyfixpodcast.com by the way. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, and go ahead and tell a friend or two about it, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from NOBA, the National Library of Medicine, PBS, CSP Global, womenshistory.org, NewScientist, Penn Nursing, Boston Magazine, JSTOR, History Extra, and FHE Health. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.