Mental Illness Treatment

By anburke
  • 400 BCE

    Hippocrates

    Hippocrates treated mental illness like it was a disease instead of the normal belief that you were possessed by a demon.
  • 450

    Middle Ages (450-1450)

    Mentally ill people were treated equally but were not given any treatment.

  • 1600s

    Europeans began to isolate mentally ill people, housing them with handicapped people as well as vagrants and delinquents. People labeled "insane" were sometimes chained to walls and treated inhumanely.

  • 1700s

    Chains and shackles for the mentally ill were removed from asylums and patients were removed from dungeons. They were treated much better but some places still treated them poorly.

  • 1800s

    U.S. reformer Dorothea Dix notices how the mentally ill are incarcerated with criminals and left unclothed and in darkness and without heat or bathrooms and many are chained and beaten. She convinces Pope Pius IX to observe how cruelly they are being treated.

  • Early 1900s

    Therapy started to be given to the mentally ill. Society would still treat the mentally ill the same.

  • 1930s

    Drugs, electro-convulsive therapy, and surgery are used to treat people with schizophrenia and others with persistent mental illnesses. Others have parts of their brain removed surgically, called lobotomy, which is performed widely over the next two decades to treat schizophrenia, intractable depression, severe anxiety, and obsessions.

  • National Mental Health Act

    Harry Truman signs the National Mental Health Act, calling for a National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research into mind, brain, and behavior and thereby reduce mental illness. As a result of this law, NIMH will be formally established on April 15, 1949.

  • 1950s

    A series of successful anti-psychotic drugs are introduced that do not cure psychosis but control its symptoms. The first of the anti-psychotics, the major class of drug used to treat psychosis, is discovered in France in 1952, called chlorpromazine. Studies show that 70 percent of patients with schizophrenia clearly improve on anti-psychotic drugs.

  • 1990s

    A new generation of anti-psychotic drugs is introduced. These drugs prove to be more effective in treating schizophrenia and have fewer side effects.