Treating the Mentally Ill Over

Treating the Mentally Ill

Over the past century, treating the mentally ill has evolved from treating the mentally ill as social pariahs, people who don't belong in society, to treating them as people who very much belong in society and who even have patient rights. Consider St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C. St. Elizabeths dates back to the 1850s, treating mentally ill patients from the poet Ezra Pond, to its current most notorious resident, John Hinckley (who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan).

Elizabeths is also the psychiatric hospital where one of the most famous neurologists in the history of mental health medicine, Dr. Walter Freeman, worked in charge of the Blackburn Pathological Laboratory at St. Elizabeths. Between 1924, when Freeman began his tenure at St. Elizabeths, he began performing what would amount to thousands of autopsies on patients who had died there (Lawrence and Weisz 168) (many of whom were homeless and indigent prior to arrival at St. Elizabeths where they subsequently died (Pressman 74)). Freeman later went on to what he perceived to be the perfected modification of lobotomies, and performed his first lobotomy on a patient (referred to then as inmates (Pressman 74) (Lawrence and Weisz 168). The modified perfection of the procedure that Freeman used was to enter the brain behind the eye, using a golden ice pick (Pressman 316). While Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies at St. Elizabeths, and around the U.S., he is perhaps best known for the procedure because of one of his earliest and most famous patients, Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the late President John F. Kennedy (Szasz 152).

With the introduction of pharmacological interventions for mentally ill patients, and because of the negative attention surrounding the lobotomy, especially its most famous patient, Rosemary; lobotomies were soon done away with, and considered cruel and even negligent, because psychiatric treatment is not an exact science. There remains much that we do not know about how the human brain works, but because lobotomies came to be perceived as monstrous, so, too, did Freeman in the minds of many people become the Frankenstein of psychiatric care. Freeman's work, however, advanced the understanding of the human brain in ways that probably helped pharmaceutical companies develop pharmacological interventions for people suffering from mental illness.

Long past its mythological place in the history of mankind and medicine, epilepsy continued to be perceived by many in very medieval terms; as the possession of a person by the devil, demonic possession, and, by some, as a form of mental illness (Szasz 117). Sir John Russell Reynolds (1828-196) was one of the earliest physicians to observe and conclude that people suffering from epilepsy were not necessarily suffering from a mental disorder or even possession by demonic monsters (117-118). Many psychiatrists and mental health experts, however, continued to look at epilepsy as a mental impairment (117-119). From 1890 to 1940 people suffering from epilepsy were "colonized" into institutional settings for the mentally ill, and treated for their seizures with a variety of drugs ranging from opium to Dilantin (121).