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| part 5: the way of the future |
| there were a wide variety of treatments just in the span of teton state hospital's existance - means by which it was hoped that the mentally ill would be miraculously cured and able to rejoin society. pity so few of them worked. there was hydrotherapy, where one was restrained in a bathtub so only one's head was sticking out, after which the tub would be filled with intensely hot or cold water, as it was felt that psychosis was the result of the brain being too hot or too cold. one might be left in such a state for days if staff felt it fitting, with no break to leave for the bathroom, no time to stretch about, no time to sleep. there was insulin shock treatment, wherein an epileptic fit and following coma were induced through administering massive doses of insulin. the ever present risk was that the patient might go into shock, be paralyzed, or never return to consciousness. there was the lobotomy, wherein a rod was inserted through the top of the eye socket, severing the nerve pathways in the prefrontal cortex, or simply scrambling the front of the brain. the infamous dr. walter freeman would travel around the country in an rv (dubbed the lobotomobile) performing hundreds of these procedures a year using no anaesthetic and an icepick. from the 1960's on, thorazine and its daughter drug haldol came into vogue. these drugs caused confusion and a painful restlessness that caused patients to shuffle around like zombies, too numb to think or speak in any manner that resembled the way a human would function. one of the most horrifying of their myriad of permanent side effects is tardive dyskinesia, which is a series of grotesque involuntary muscle spasms and tics that render one incapable of ever passing for normal. there are many, many others - from electroconvulsive shock therapy to dozens of different restraints to the informal 'shoe leather treatment' which involved being kicked by attendants. there was the 'therapeautic milieu', which was nothing more than being contained for your whole life in a small ward overflowing with people growing crazier each day as the weight of confinement eroded the sanity of those who had it to begin with. fear not, we have made such progress since then! today we allow a few to wither in underfunded, barely supervised programs, while the greater majority are left to their own - to homelessness, to poor or nonexistant medical care, to the callowness of bureaucracy, to prisons, to the hundreds of drugs thrown at them that are hardly tested and cause a plethora of side effects from mild (weight gain, sexual disfunction) to severe (permanent liver/brain damage). it's time to wake up and smell the past, my friends. it's time to look at our present with open eyes and to realize that the way of the future is at hand, and it looks a lot like very many of the places we have already been. pray that you and your loved ones stay well. |
