Recent research has devoted much effort to exploring mental health treatment as it has been one of the thorniest issues throughout time. Still, the healing of mental problems and the attitude towards it has undergone fundamental changes from the 1400s until now. Even though it is hardly possible to remove prejudice about mental health from people’s minds, modern society makes efforts to overcome it. In medieval times, mental illness was believed to signify witches or other demonic spirits (Szasz, 1960). Hence, the treatment was, at best, exorcism but could be imprisonment or execution. By the 1600s, though not becoming something “normal,” the handling of the mentally ill evolved into a business, and ‘mad houses’ began to be built. In the 18th century, such people were placed in asylums opened at federal and private levels. At first glance, it appears to be the start of targeted assistance to people with mental health disorders. Still, in reality, it instead served to separate them from the rest of society and, thus, connected to the prison system of that time (Lindeboom & Ham, 1975). Some social activists, such as Dorothea Dix, started to demand reforms concerning the position of mentally ill people. Yet, despite more asylums being constructed, the treatment remained inhumane, including electroshock or cold bath immersion, only with Sigmund Freud, who created psychological methods of dealing with mental suffering, the real help provided to the people. From the 1950s, deinstitutionalization progressed significantly, as people considered the existing hospitals inappropriate for healing these diseases. Still, this process is rather controversial and, apart from the improving condition of many people, resulting in the thousands of homeless, increase in suicide rates and accidents with the participation of the sick. Nowadays, medical centers devoted to mental health remedies are opened all around the globe, and stigmatization concerning this issue tends to disappear. In the US in 2016, the 21st Century Cures Act was signed, which directed at increasing funding for mental health treatment and research.
References
Lindeboom, G. A., & Ham, A. A. G. (1975). Nursing and Hospitals. In A Classified Bibliography of the History of Dutch Medicine 1900–1974 (pp. 439-466). Springer.
Szasz, T. S. (1960). The myth of mental illness. American psychologist, 15(2), 113.