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Societal Changes Source #16
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In the 1950s, the public defined mental illness in much narrower and more extreme terms than did psychiatry, and fearful and rejecting attitudes toward people with mental illnesses were common.
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Societal Changes Source #16
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Nunnally (1961), for example, found that people were more likely to apply a broad range of negative adjectives such as "danger- ous," "dirty," "worthless," "bad," "weak," and "ignorant" to a person labeled as "insane" or "neurotic" than to an "average" person
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Societal Changes Source #2
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The public was not particularly skilled at distinguishing mental illness from ordinary unhappiness and worry and tended to see only extreme forms of behavior—namely psychosis—as mental illness
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Societal Changes Source #2
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Mental illness carried great social stigma, especially linked with fear of unpredictable and violent behavior.
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Societal Changes Source #14
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More than any other mental institution in the United States, Atascadero State Hospital (photograph) was a chamber of horrors for homosexuals. The tag "Homosexual Dachau" was well-earned for its forced lobotomies, castrations and brutal treatments practiced at that facility. Hundreds of gays and lesbians were forcibly sent by their families to be cured of homosexuality which, as recently as the early 1970s, was considered a sexual and psychological disorder.
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Societal Changes Source #14
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The most notorious was a Dr. Walter J. Freeman who perfected the ice pick lobotomy. He jammed an ice pick through a homosexual's eyes into the brain and performed a primitive lobotomy. According to records, he treated over 4,000 patients this way around America and it is estimated that nearly 30% to 40% were homosexuals. He believed deeply this was the only way to cure homosexuality.
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Societal Changes Source #16
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They implied that persons identi- fied as mentally ill might suffer extreme rejec- tion and stigmatization. And they implied that many people would fail to seek mental health treatment that might benefit them.
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Societal Changes Source #16
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As we enter the new millennium, however, there are reasons to believe that orientations toward mental illness may have changed-per- haps dramaticaily-since these early studies were conducted. The clearest change is that many more people now seek mental health treatment
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Societal Changes Source #16
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The public's negative orientations toward mental illness also extended to the profession- als who treated it. Nunnally (1961) found that the public evaluated professionals who treat mental disorders significantly more negatively than those who treat physical disorders
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Societal Changes Source #16
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Veroff et al. (1981) found an increase between 1957 and 1976 not only in reports of actual help-seeking but also in hypothetical "readi- ness for self-referral," suggesting that increased utilization reflects, at least in part, both a greater tendency to view emotional or behavioral problems as something that a men- tal health professional might be able to help with and a greater willingness to seek such help
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Historical Background Source #15
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The "psychological school" interpreted mental disease as being due to deviations in the personality, problems in rearing and childhood, discontrol of internal drives, etc. caused by external factors. This school was typified by psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud in the beginning of the 20th. century.
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Historical Background Source #15
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The "biological school", instead, considered that mental diseases, particularly the psychoses, were caused by pathological alterations of the brain, chemical or structural.
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Historical Background Source #15
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Consequently, the approaches to therapy by each school were markedly different. The success of shock therapy, which was evidently due to some drastic alteration in the internal environment of the brain and on the functions of the neural cells, was a strong argument in favor of the biological causation of many mental diseases.
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Historical Background Source #15
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One of the unexpected benefits of transcranial electroshock was that it provoked retrograde amnesia, or a loss of all memory of events immediately anterior to the shock, including its perception. Therefore, the patients had no negative feelings towards the therapy, as it happened with metrazol shock. Furthermore, ECT was more reliable and controllable and less dangerous to the patient than metrazol.
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Historical Background Source #9
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The 1962 work, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey, shows the abuse of electroshock therapy to control patients in a mental institution.
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Historical Background Source #9
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Electroshock therapy, or Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), is a "medical procedure in which a brief electrical stimulus is used to induce a cerebral seizure under controlled conditions."
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Historical Background Source #7
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A course of treatment with ECT usually consists of six to twelve treatments. When these have taken full effect, the patient's brain is stimulated, using electrodes placed at precise locations on the patient's head, with a brief controlled series of electrical pulses. This stimulus causes a seizure within the brain, which lasts for approximately a minute. Because of the muscle relaxants and anesthesia, the patient's body does not convulse and the patient feels no pain. The patient awakens after five to ten minutes, much as he or she would from minor surgery.
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Historical Background Source #5
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ECT was developed by Ugo Cerletti who thought electricity would induce seizures quickly. He experimented on dogs and observed pigs being stunned with electricity before slaughter and determined that electricity would indeed induce a fit.
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Historical Background Source #5
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In the beginning of ECT use, many patients suffered from convulsions, impaired mental function and even bone fractures caused by muscle contractions and other injuries caused by the seizure.
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Historical Background Source #15
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In the mid-twentieth century, the lobotomy was such a popular "cure" for mental illness that Freeman's colleague António Egas Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his role in perfecting the operation
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Historical Background Source #15
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While Moniz was treating patients in Europe, Freeman started using an ice pick-shaped instrument in America to perform up to 25 lobotomies a day, without anaesthesia, while reporters looked on
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Historical Background Source #15
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Freeman's crazy antics didn't scare off potential patients, though: John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary got a lobotomy from Freeman, which left her a vegetable for the rest of her life. And she was one of many people whose "cure" was more like zombification than freedom from mental anguish.
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Historical Background Source #15
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The frontal Lobe could somehow be seated from the rest of the brain. This would leave incurably schizophrenic patients relieved of their emotional distress, they believed
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Historical Background Source #15
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In 2005 NPR did an interesting profile of a man who was given a lobotomy by Freeman in the 1950s, because his stepmother felt that he was "savage" and refused to go to bed. The man was traumatized by the experience, but seemed to have suffered no ill effects
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Historical Background Source #15
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But Freeman became a big hit in America, where he toured hospitals performing the procedure and training psychologists to do it too. He even prescribed it for headaches
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Scientific Progress Source #8
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According to the American Psychiatric Association, until 1974 homosexuality was a mental illness. And, of course, homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in DSM-II. (The DSM - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - is the APA's standard classification of their so-called mental disorders, and is used by many mental health workers in the USA and other countries.)
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Scientific Progress Source #8
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What's noteworthy about this is that the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses was not triggered by some scientific breakthrough. There was no new fact or set of facts that stimulated this major change. Rather, it was the simple reality that gay people started to kick up a fuss. They gained a voice and began to make themselves heard. And the APA reacted with truly astonishing speed. And with good reason
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Scientific Progress Source #10
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Before the 1970s, depression was usually considered a relatively rare condition involving feelings of intense meaninglessness and worthlessness often accompanied by vegetative and psychotic symptoms and preoccupations with death and dying (Shorter 2009). Moreover, depression was more likely to be associated with hospitalized patients than with clients of general physicians or outpatient psychiatrists.
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Scientific Progress Source #17
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However, in the 70's, strong movements against institutionalized psychiatry began in Europe and particularly in the USA. "One flew over the Cukoo's nest" led people to dislike the use of this treatment.
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Scientific Progress Source #17
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By the mid-1970s ECT had fallen into disrepute. Psychiatrists increasingly made use of powerful new drugs, such as thorazine and other antidepressives and antipsychotics.
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Scientific Progress Source #6
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It eventually became a source of controversy due to misuse and negative side effects. ECT was used indiscriminately and was often prescribed for treating disorders on which it had no real effect, such as alcohol dependence, and was used for punitive reasons.
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Treatment Today Source #6
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ECT is still used today but with less frequency and with modifications that have made the procedure safer and less unpleasant. Anesthetics and muscle relaxants are usually administered to prevent bone fractures or other injuries from muscle spasms.
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Treatment Today Source #6
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About 100,000 people in the United States receive electroconvulsive therapy annually. ECT can only be administered with the informed consent of the patient and is used primarily for severely depressed patients who have not responded to antidepressant medications or whose suicidal impulses make it dangerous to wait until such medications can take effect.
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Scientific Progress Source #6
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Contrary to the theories of those who first pioneered its use, ECT is not an effective treatment for schizophrenia unless the patient is also suffering from depression.
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Historical Background Source #18
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It began in the 1930s, at a time when some psychiatrists in Europe and the US experimented with the drug metrazol to induce epileptic-like convulsions in schizophrenic patients. The theory was that epilepsy and schizophrenia were opposed. However, the convulsions were so violent that many patients broke bones or fractured their spines
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Historical Background Source #18
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ECT applied brief but powerful shocks via two electrodes, called 'paddles', placed on the patient's forehead
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Treatment Today Source #3
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Your treatment plan for depression will depend on the type you have and how severe it is. Some people get psychotherapy. Others also take antidepressants or get other treatments. Exercise can also be part of the plan.
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Historical Background Source #20
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Their first surgery, on a mentally ill woman, involved drilling two holes in her skull and pumping alcohol into her frontal cortex. Later surgeries involved "coring" several regions in the frontal cortex with hollow needles — literally sucking out parts of the brain to sever neural connections
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Historical Background Source #20
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All these surgeries were done blind, which is to say they rarely opened up a person's skull to see where they were cutting. Moniz and Freeman just drilled into skull and guesstimated where they should core or cut.
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Historical Background Source #12
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"The behaviors [doctors] were trying to fix, they thought, were set down in neurological connections," Lerner told Live Science. "The idea was, if you could damage those connections, you could stop the bad behaviors."
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Historical Background Source #12
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But the operations had severe side effects, including increased temperature, vomiting, bladder and bowel incontinence and eye problems, as well apathy, lethargy, and abnormal sensations of hunger, among others
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Treatment Today Source #13
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Today lobotomy is rarely performed; however, shock therapy and psychosurgery (the surgical removal of specific regions of the brain) occasionally are used to treat patients whose symptoms have resisted all other treatments.
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Unknown Source #1
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The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers
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Unknown Source #4
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We may not know why a disorder strikes women more than men, or why another disorder which typically affects older adults suddenly shows up in a teenager.
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Unknown Source #4
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In many cases, researchers may not even know which gene (if it is, in fact, only one and not several) is causing the problem; they just know that there's a neurological and biological basis.
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Unknown Source #19
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The loosening of diagnostic criteria led to an extraordinary expansion of the numbers of people defined as mentally ill
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Unknown Source #19
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Juvenile bipolar disorder', for example, increased forty-fold in just a decade, between 1994 and 2004.
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Unknown Source #19
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An autism epidemic broke out, as a formerly rare condition, seen in less than one in five hundred children at the outset of the same decade, was found in one in every ninety children only ten years later
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Unknown Source #19
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The story for hyperactivity, subsequently relabelled ADHD is similar, with 10 per cent of male American children now taking pills daily for their 'disease'
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Unknown Source #19
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Among adults, one in every seventy-six Americans qualified for welfare payments based upon mental disability by 2007.
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