The typical picture of psychiatry includes a long leather chaise lounge, perhaps a sofa, and a bearded, bespectacled man sitting in an armchair with a notepad and pen at the ready.
Sometimes he has a German accent, sometimes he does not. Perhaps he asked about your dreams or talks about phallic symbols.
Either way, the imagination does not conjure up the sound of a hole being drilled into the patient’s head or having the patient wrapped in cold, soaking wet towels (hypothermia, much?).
But apparently it should.
At least according to a recent post from the Mental Floss blog called “10 Mind-Boggling Psychiatric Treatments.” These guys have dug around in psychiatry’s scandalous past and found treatments that are so beyond unfathomable that words like “outrageous” and “ridiculous” cannot even begin to describe them.
But we all know, of course, that every science has got to start somewhere. Take the Plato and Hippocrates joint effort to treat hysteria in women. They attributed all mental issues in women to “wandering womb” syndrome, meaning that the uterus was unhappy and had therefore taken to floating around to different parts of the body. The only real cure: have a baby.
To read more about this and other treatments that ranked on the list, read the full article here.
Image: NIU
Tags: psychiatry, psychiatric treatments, history, history of psychiatry, wandering womb, phrenology, hysteria, mental illness, diagnosing mental illness, Mental Floss
