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Asylums, Lobotomies and ECTs - The Horrifying History of Mental Illness “Cures.” With Prof. Andrew Scull
What do lunatic asylums, lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy have in common? They were all desperate attempts to cure mental illness. Long before the advent of pharmacology, "maverick" psychiatrists proposed different theories on what caused madness - from germs and infections to abnormal pathways in the brain.
These ideas gave birth to a host of horrific "cures" that often left the patients worse off than before... if they managed to survive them in the first place.
In his acclaimed book Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness, historian of medicine Prof…
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