Aug 18, 2023 07:44 AM
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/...ntentions/
EXCERPTS: Identity-based theories of mental illness are a contemporary trend, but if we step back and take a longer view it becomes clear that the history of mental health policy has often been driven by ideologies that, while offered with the best of intentions, where not driven by evidence.
[...] Some positive results were found with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and psychosurgery (e.g., lobotomy), but almost from the beginning these methods were seen as brutal and oppressive.
ECT’s first depiction in American film was in Anatole Litvak’s 1948 psychological drama The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland as a woman with paranoid delusions, and in subsequent films the presentation of ECT has gotten progressively more negative...
[...] in the 1960s, as a number of human rights movements were gaining strength, the treatment of patients with severe mental illness became a target of concern. ... n 1967, Fredrick Wiseman’s film Titicut Follies portrayed the horrible conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts...
[...] These horrific cases of abuse—and many others—fueled a theory that it was the institutions themselves that were the problem. This view was further supported by American libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szaz, who argued against what he called the “myth of mental illness,” suggesting instead that people with schizophrenia and other disorders were merely experiencing “problems of living” and that involuntary institutionalization and the insanity defense should be eliminated (Szaz 1960).
Similarly, the 1975 Academy Award–winning film One Flew Oner the Cuckoo’s Nest presented the view that much of the problem was the oppressive institution, personified by Nurse Ratched, and that the appropriate response was escape.
By coincidence, these anti-institutional views and an increased concern for civil liberties took hold as the first round of effective antipsychotic drugs became available, making the deinstitutionalization movement a possibility. In theory, the state institutions would be emptied out, and with the aid of appropriate medications, formerly hospitalized patients would be treated in local community mental health facilities. An additional benefit of this movement for state governments was to shift the expense of mental health care from the states to the federal government through Medicaid payments to the community mental health facilities (Eisenberg 2010).
As we now know, this plan, which was mostly motivated by good intentions, did not come to pass. The promise of an effective network of community mental health facilities was unfulfilled, and many people with serious mental illness were suddenly on their own... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/4TqiaLCpsak
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4TqiaLCpsak
EXCERPTS: Identity-based theories of mental illness are a contemporary trend, but if we step back and take a longer view it becomes clear that the history of mental health policy has often been driven by ideologies that, while offered with the best of intentions, where not driven by evidence.
[...] Some positive results were found with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and psychosurgery (e.g., lobotomy), but almost from the beginning these methods were seen as brutal and oppressive.
ECT’s first depiction in American film was in Anatole Litvak’s 1948 psychological drama The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland as a woman with paranoid delusions, and in subsequent films the presentation of ECT has gotten progressively more negative...
[...] in the 1960s, as a number of human rights movements were gaining strength, the treatment of patients with severe mental illness became a target of concern. ... n 1967, Fredrick Wiseman’s film Titicut Follies portrayed the horrible conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts...
[...] These horrific cases of abuse—and many others—fueled a theory that it was the institutions themselves that were the problem. This view was further supported by American libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szaz, who argued against what he called the “myth of mental illness,” suggesting instead that people with schizophrenia and other disorders were merely experiencing “problems of living” and that involuntary institutionalization and the insanity defense should be eliminated (Szaz 1960).
Similarly, the 1975 Academy Award–winning film One Flew Oner the Cuckoo’s Nest presented the view that much of the problem was the oppressive institution, personified by Nurse Ratched, and that the appropriate response was escape.
By coincidence, these anti-institutional views and an increased concern for civil liberties took hold as the first round of effective antipsychotic drugs became available, making the deinstitutionalization movement a possibility. In theory, the state institutions would be emptied out, and with the aid of appropriate medications, formerly hospitalized patients would be treated in local community mental health facilities. An additional benefit of this movement for state governments was to shift the expense of mental health care from the states to the federal government through Medicaid payments to the community mental health facilities (Eisenberg 2010).
As we now know, this plan, which was mostly motivated by good intentions, did not come to pass. The promise of an effective network of community mental health facilities was unfulfilled, and many people with serious mental illness were suddenly on their own... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/4TqiaLCpsak
