4 More Insane Cures for Insanity

8/22/2017

Lately, I've been taking another crack at Excluded before it re-releases (hopefully) by the end of this year. By another crack I mean editing and redrafting a bit, by which I mean a chore I try to put off a little more often than I'd care to admit.

Sometimes my excuses are quite wild; sometimes I blame another book.

That's the case with this blog. Don't consider it so much as a form procrastination as much as a productive way to step aside from Excluded and look at some of the other horror elements I've come up with since the novel.

In this case, I reviewed some drafts of Ashland's Asylum as well as an older post called 6 Insane Cures for Insanity.

Although I'm reviewing some of the treatments from the previous post, to see what makes for an intense scene or two in the book, I can't help but continue diving into the other bizarre methods doctors once used to "rid" their patients of various psychological ailments. As always, feel free to let me know if one of these treatments deserves to be in the novel.

TREPANNING

They scalped and drilled a hole into your skull to treat intracranial diseases

Parietal art suggests this practice is almost 10,000 years old and was perhaps developed to treat migraines, seizures, and mental disorders. And honestly, I've contemplated (no, not seriously) drilling a hole through my skull to elevate the ache of a migraine from time to time.

BARBARIC SURGERY

The morbidly obese visit doctors who perform a "lobotomy" on their stomachs, so to speak, in which a device is surgically implanted into them to restrict the use of the stomach. And in some cases, parts of the stomach are removed altogether.

This is a practice that wasn't designed so much to treat the mentally ill as it was to achieve significant weight-loss. However, as with many weight-loss programs that sound a little too good to be true, this form of barbaric surgery comes along with it's consequences. In one case, almost 22% of patients reported exacerbated issues during their stay at the hospital, and and overwhelming 40% report issues within 6 months of the surgery. Oddly enough, you can still have this procedure performed on you today.

METRAZOL SEIZURES

During his time, Hungarian pathologist Ladislas von Meduna might have sounded like an absolute genius, but after you read the following, you might question why anyone trusted the man.

Menduna noticed schizophrenia was exceptionally rare amongst epileptics. He also pointed out how, once an epileptic had a seizure, they seemed relatively calm and at ease. So, he concluded the optimal way to treat schizophrenia was by inducing a seizure.

Inducing a seizure wasn't incredibly easy at the time, and it required experimenting with different forms of medicine, such as strychnine, absinthe, and metrazol.

For awhile, his method seemed like the best one. No one could (or can) really figure out why seizures appeared to treat schizophrenic behavior and symptoms. What was figured out was the high risk of damage to the patients, including fractured, if not broken, bones and memory loss.

PHRENOLOGY

19th Century German physician Franz Gall came up with a supposed way of determining his patients' personalities and behaviors based on the bumps and valleys of their skulls.

Phrenology wore off by the 1900s largely due to the fact phrenologists could not treat, cure, or diagnose any ailment properly with any sort of accuracy.

Nonetheless, Gall figured if you used a certain region of your brain more, it would get bigger, which in turn brought out the hills and valleys of one's skull. The scary part was that phrenologists sometimes used their findings to suggest someone was aggressive, sexually obsessed, and so on.

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