Mental illness has become a mainstay of modern society. It affects an ever-widening swath of the population and demands the largest share of pharmaceutical marketing attention, as the business of ameliorating unwanted mental suffering grosses billions. In popular culture, this suffering is depicted everywhere from tabloids to blockbusters, from books to billboards, and from celebrity magazines to local anti-stigma campaigns. Yet in spite of this apparently unrestricted proliferation, we often blindly cling to the idea that as a society we are improving.
From our smug 21st-century perspective, the history of mental hospitals and the disordered minds and bodies captured within them represents a bygone era of backward thinking, incarceration and the so-called dark ages of psychiatry when crude interventions such as lobotomies and electro-shock therapies were the best that the profession had to offer people suffering from delusions, gripping depressions or catatonic...
Erika Dyck is a professor of history and holds the Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press, 2012).
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