10 Terrifying Psychotherapy Treatments Of The Past

 In older days, people were not as kind to those who were patients in an insane asylum and they were often tortured or mistreated.  People believed that the insane were mostly a burden that needed to be dealt with instead of a person who simply lives a different sort of live which requires kind accommodations. 

Take a look at these techniques used to keep these patients under control. They were often painful and cruel.

1. Electroconvulsive Therapy

Otherwise known as electroshock, this form of treatment was the process of retraining the mental patient in order to send hundreds of volts of electricity through their brain. Many of the patients suffered from extreme memory loss afterwards.

2. Trepanning

This ancient practice goes as far back as prehistoric times. In this method, holes were drilled into the patients’ skull to release the evil that was believed to be inside of them.

3. Hydrotherapy

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, hydrotherapy took place by strapping patients inside a bathtub or alternatively, wrapping them tightly with cloths and then subjecting them to violent jets of water in order to sedate them.

4. Insulin Shock Therapy

Doctor Manfred Sakel created a method of inducing comas in the early 1920’s. Mental patients were injected with insulin in order to cause them to slip into a coma.  According to this doctor, they would emerge from their coma cured.

5. Lobotomy

image credit-BBC

During the first two decades of the 20th century, doctors were removing the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex because they believed that this would cure mental patients.

6. Sterilization

Julius Wagner-Jauregg, an Austrian physician sometimes sterilized patients who engaged in excessive masturbation because he believed that they had developed schizophrenia.

7. Malaria Injections

Patients with Neurosyphilis were injected with Malaria to raise their body temperatures extremely and, in turn, killed the Syphilis virus.

8. Organ Removal

image source-Gizmodo

This early 20th-century psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Cotton, believed that mental disorders were caused by bacteria inside of the body.  He took to removing entire organs that he believed were infected.  Not many people survived this treatment.

9. Restraint In Utica Cribs

source-mn.gov

An unruly patient might have been restrained in one of these. They remained in this tiny coffee until they were sedated.

10. Sleep Deprivation

This was believed to help in the treatment of depression.