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6500 BCE
Prehistoric skulls
Prehistoric skulls and cave art has identified surgical drilling of holes in the head to release evil spirits. -
400 BCE
Hippocrates discovery
Hippocrates attempted to separate superstition and religion from medicine and that bodily fluids were responsible for mental illnesses. -
Period: 1001 to 1500
Supernatural
Mental illnesses were believed to be caused by the supernatural and the devil in Europe. Common treatments for these included prayer rites, relic touching, confessions, and atonement -
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix went into asylums that the mentally ill were being kept and noticed the inhumane conditions. Some of the conditions she noted were overcrowding, unsanitary rooms, and abuse towards the patients. She then helped establish over 30 mental institutes to help the patients in poor conditions. -
Athens Asylum
In January, the town of Athens made their own mental institution named “Athens Asylum for the Insane”. It was pleasing to look at from the outside but it was just covering up the awful conditions that were going on inside. -
Period: to
Infected body parts
Henry Cotton thought that mental illnesses were caused by infected body parts. He would remove rotten teeth, but then started removing tonsils when that wouldn't work. When neither of those worked, be began removing parts of stomachs, small intestines, appendixes, gallbladders, thyroid glands, and parts of the colon. -
Period: to
Lobotomies
Lobotomies were an often treatment and consisted of cutting or removing the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes of the brain. Few patients experienced improved symptoms, but it also came with other damage. -
Insulin therapy
About 72% of the country's 305 public and private asylums were using insulin coma therapy for different types of disorders. -
Thorazine
A push for deinstitutionalization and outpatient treatment began in many countries, facilitated by the development of an antipsychotic drug called Thorazine. -
Use of drugs
Opium, morphine, and chloral hydrate were used to treat patients in overcrowded asylums, but they often had side effects including psychotic episodes. -
Diagnostic and Statistic Manual
When the American Psychiatric Association published the first Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, the number of diagnosable disorders has tripled since it was first published. -
Antipsychotic drugs
The first effective antipsychotic drug was being used, and the number of patients in asylums has decreased by 430,000 over the next 40 years. -
Mental Institutes
Mentally ill patients had moved to local mental health homes from previous psychiatric institutes. -
Mentally Ill Patients
The number of mentally ill people in institutes had decreased by 100,000 in the US. -
Progression of Mental Illnesses
Research and the understanding of how the brain functions have helped treat many mental illnesses and have helped prevent some disorders.
