Mad in America
As research for my Ice Horror project, I've been reading about insanity. This morning I finished the second book I've read on the topic, Mad in America.
I'm reading about madness so I can paint a visually accurate picture of asylum life in the first half of this century—confinement, continuous baths, sheet wrapping, electroshock, and so forth—as well as to develop a historical vocabulary about treatment of the mentally ill so I'll be able to write passable dialog on the subject.
It will come as a shock to no one that madhouses in the late 1900s and early twentieth century were travesties of both medicine and human rights. What took me completely off guard, though, was that as I continued to read chronologically about the treatment of schizophrenia with modern antipsychotic medicines the treatment just didn't get any better. It didn't get any better in the sixties, it didn't get any better in the seventies, yadda yadda, it's not any better today. In fact, there is little credible evidence that even the newest round of medications for schizophrenia—currently being sold to the tune of billions of dollars in profits—are significantly better than the lobotomies performed in the forties and fifties.
This sobering paragraph summarizes the book's preface (and is taken from the Mad in America website):
The World Health Organization has repeatedly found that people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the U.S. and other developed countries fare much worse than schizophrenia patients in poor countries. In the poor countries, a high percentage of patients recover and lead active social lives. In the U.S. and other developed countries, most patients so diagnosed become chronically ill. An understanding of this failure of modern medicine can be found by tracing the history of medical treatments for madness to the present day.You would be better off as a schizophrenic in Colombia than in Manhattan.
If anyone you know is being treated with drugs for mental illness, you should read Mad in America. It may not utterly convince you that we may as well go back to bloodletting—and I'm maintaining a healthy skepticism as well—but it presents a point of view it would be foolish to discount out of hand.
Comments