It’s quite incredible to think that 50 years ago Doctors used to cut out people’s brains out of their skull as a reasonable treatment for depression and bipolar and schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
The last lobotomy was in 1967.
These are doctors, the medical profession.
The same doctors also though injecting massive doses of insulin to induce a coma, from days to weeks, was a reasonable form of mental illness treatment. “Insulin shock therapy”
People regularly died.
This lasted until the late1970’s
If they didn’t die, many patients emerged from treatments morbidly obese, or brain damaged. Just crazy to think doctors really don’t know jack shit about mental illness. Still don’t.
It’s weird because mental illness is not universal. It’s impacted by culture and society and a host of sociological factors that shape psychology. Different countries have different rates of mental disorders and they manifest differently. How they interpret them and treat them changes.What behaviors are seen as abnormal or within the spectrum of normal. It’s very subjective. And how we treat people determines a lot of outcomes. If we treat them as broken, they’re unlikely to recover
If they’re treated as someone that can be rehabilitated, it changes things
This applies to criminal systems as well.
Back in the day there was a therapeutic nihilism, or the idea that it’s impossible to cure people or societies of their ills through treatment.
Then there was a resurgence of “heroic measures” or heroic treatments that were high risk, but better than the alternative of a life in an asylum, so they began these crazy ass treatments like lobotomies and insulin shock and electro shock.
LSD would repair things. It’s like a reboot I enjoy it.
Allows me to step outside myself, beyond the conditioned unconscious perspective dominating the subconscious that ultimately informs conscious experience.
It’s not like an everyday thing. Or every week. Honestly, i really don’t like doing it until I’m in a comfortable place to do it. I’m hyper aware of my responsibilities and I don’t want to be irresponsible or be too causal about it. I guess that’s with big trips, life changing doses.
I enjoy the occasional casual micro dose, like an 1/8 of a hit on the weekend to sharpen things up. But I always know that even doses that exceed two, that it’s always gonna be alright. I always wake up the next day feeling more clear headed.
Like, priorities are more obvious. The minutia melts and what needs to be done, or what’s most important remains. For better or worse, but in my mind always for better. And i say for worse because sometimes I think our society rewards being a neurotic, and psychedelics really massage that mentality, and allow you to gain distance from these delusional problems that we perceive to plague us, but are really just nonsense bullshit we buy into, that pervades advertising, and is implied by our cultural values, in media and entertainment and the rat race and politics.
So it’s always for better. But sometimes being disenchanted makes it harder to buy in, if that makes sense.
Like the Kardashians and Trump need to drop. Their sense of self would dissolve and they’d implode and have a spiritual awakening. But I’m not sure that’d be good for their brand.
It’s very interesting to read history and try to understand their notion of mind and psychology, and how intimately it was tired to spirituality, to spirits inhabiting us, and how far we’ve secularized these ideas with science. But there is something intuitive about anthropomorphizing mental illness… being possessed and what not. I do think of minds like computers that run programs. And you have faulty programs and shit
Like. I look at videos of people with mental illness back in the day and they don’t look like the way characterize people nowadays.
Just weird. Trying to reconcile how the mind works… what causes this shit
William Dare 