Treating " Mental Health " !

In the century in which Australia was founded the world had " Lunatic Asylums "  to care for those  with mental disorders.   That term became repugnant and by the twentieth century they were called " Psychiatric Institutions " and they served the same purpose.

The human brain is perhaps the least understood of the organs that constitute the human body.  Only recently have we made progress into the field of artificial intelligence which seeks to duplicate the thought processes that has bestowed the wonders of ingenuity that now surround us.  Despite ongoing progress, the brain is still something that we do not yet fully understand.

One experiment had a profound impact on the way mental studies progressed.    In 1973 a gifted Stanford psychology professor by the name of David Rosenhan persuaded  eight healthy people to feign hallucinations and get themselves into mental asylums.  Once inside, they would have to prove their sanity to get out.

The difficulties they encountered were so explosive that they demonstrated the inability of even trained professionals to tell the difference between the mentally ill and the mentally healthy.   That experiment is still widely used in psychiatric training regimens.

It is often claimed that this experiment caused the world to turn away from central institutional care of the mentally unwell and replace it with a few beds dedicated to mental health in local regional hospitals.  The impetus changed to using psychotic countering drugs to achieve a speedy discharge, with the hope the patient will continue using that medication on their return to society.

The whole field of psychiatric care was turned on its head.  Those massive institutions closed their doors and were not replaced.  Big Pharma had a major say on how psychiatric illness was treated and what evolved was a " shadow mental care health system " in which those that fell through the cracks usually ended up in state prisons.

That is where we are today.  It is estimated that at least twenty percent of those incarcerated in prison fit the criteria for serious mental illness.  Usually the diagnosis and provision of psychiatric drugs ceases when they go behind iron bars and they re-emerge with their illness untreated when their sentence is served.

Much has been written about the horrors of 19th century asylums but today we have replaced them with a different sort of hellhole.  The money saved by closing psychiatric hospitals is being spent on ever greater expansion of the prison systems  !