THE QUAKER INFLUENCE ON THE TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS

The Quaker influence on the treatment of mental illness

The Quaker influence on the treatment of mental illness

Introduction

In the 18th and 19th centuries, in England and subsequent in the United States, there appeared a sequence of amazingly  fiendish and sadistic “treatments” for insanity.  The ideas about human demeanour suggested in support of the use of these treatments were as bizarre as the treatments themselves, as were the diagnostic criteria by which persons were regarded to be in need of them.  Periods of humanitarian restructure, for example the “moral treatment” of the Quakers and Philippe Pinel's restructures in French asylums, came between swell of barbaric assaults on the bodies and minds of those regrettable sufficient to be advised lunatics.  Eugenics blended with blatant racism became part of the not-at-all-pretty image, coming to a top in Nazi Germany.  

 

Discussion

Clearly there has been a stress between two rudimentary points of outlook that has been playing out over time.  One issue of outlook glimpsed lunacy as a the outcome of a presumed hereditary defect and produced in drastic and degrading personal interventions to subdue the demeanour producing from this presumed defect, as well as compelled sterilization to halt its spread.  The other issue of outlook glimpsed the knowledge of madmen (and women) as certain thing which might really have some kind of implication, and in any case would reply better to kind and mild remedy than to torture.

The bizarre types of torture administered in the title of healing throughout the 19th 100 years developed in the first half of the 20th 100 years into chemical and electric shock treatments, as well as lobotomy and other kinds of psychosurgery.  The kinder and gentler lesson treatments discovered new sign in certain kinds of psychotherapy, the community mental wellbeing action, and therapeutic communities.

 In the second half of the 20th 100 years the image gets more complex.  The advent of thorazine and other neuroleptics appeared to integrate the efforts to subdue and command psychotic method with the effort to be kind and mild with those experiencing such processes.  Asylums could be mercifully drained, as their previous inhabitants were notified that they had an sickness analogous to diabetes, which could be controlled if they easily made a firm promise to hold taking neuroleptic medication for remainder of their lives. 

What was unseen throughout these decades, and occasionally dynamically hid, was the climbing on clues that the prime long period consequences of neuroleptics on those who took them were to  (1) deeply and lastingly decrease the specify to life, (2) induce drastic and irreversible neurological impairment, and (3) enhance one's vulnerability to future psychotic episodes if one were to cease taking neuroleptics because of (1) and (2).  

The motives going by car those who unseen and/or hid the consequences of thorazine and its subsequent mutations were a blend of factors.  Plain vintage fashioned greed on the part of pharmaceutical businesses who were making a treasure off the neuroleptics was most absolutely one of ...