Evolution of Schizophrenia Treatment (17th to 21st Century) [Take Two]

Schizophrenia is a mental disease that has been part of human society for thousands of years, while not seen as one for much of what one would call the modern eras of human history it has come to pass in recent years that schizophrenia came into prominence as a recognized disease. Keeping this in mind it is evident that the medical field has changed quite a bit over the years to allow this to happen but nonetheless when we look at how the medical field has evolved in their treatment of people with schizophrenia from the 17th century to the 21st century it becomes quite interesting and in many cases jarring how much has changed. The specific way of finding out how much has changed lies mainly in analyzing how the medical field has changed in their doctrine of the disease and the change in medical treatments for it. There may of course be the inevitable arguments that although the widely accepted public view has changed toward schizophrenia that there still is indeed quite a bit of negative practices that could also be directly correlated to medical practices of earlier history. This may be true on some level but I feel that there is actual concrete reasoning and logic to our practices in our day and age even if the treatment may seem cruel as compared to earlier centuries where medical practices were based on nothing but ease and predetermined beliefs.

By examining several texts and old literature over schizophrenia and comparing it to modern day texts I hope to find a correlation toward either an evolution or continuation of medical practice toward schizophrenics. Through researching this question I hope to find out how much the medical field, and as an extension humanity, has truly evolved and progressed over the centuries as compared to how much is merely what we imagined to have been progress in the field through examining the change in schizophrenic treatment.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054285682

http://www.gjpsy.uni-goettingen.de/gjp-article-kyziridis.pdf

http://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/1997/April/review2_0497.htm

The first link is an e-book which I feel will fill in the certain gaps that I may or may not have over what exactly entails schizophrenia and may help me understand why a treatment may or may not have been deemed worth use and why. The second is a brief history of schizophrenia and I believe something that will help in finding the roots of schizophrenia and some more background over the disease and the evolution in treatment. The third is a bit of an odd pick but I feel something to explore and possibly expand on considering that medical treatment in this day and age has a lot to do with drug treatment.

                All in all I hope by looking into schizophrenia and the evolution of medical treatment toward it I may find something I hadn’t thought or looked at before that may open my eyes to future endeavors and questions of interest.

"The Achievment of Desire"

The idea of the scholarship boy is an idea very near to myself due in large part due to the similar circumstances that the author describes as the boy going through and lot of my own personal experiences. Due to this connection between myself and the text I found it very interesting how he went on to describe the scholarship boy as a bad student. Upon reading that statement in the passage by Richard Rodriguez I felt quite shocked how he could call someone who had diligently dedicated their life to academic success and done so well on paper a bad student. I looked over the passage where he explained why the scholarship boy was in fact a bad student and I thought over the validity of what was said and eventually came to the conclusion that he was on some level correct. The charge that the scholarship boy was a person with no real opinion for themselves is extremely valid and something that I have not only bared witness to myself but have actually been guilty of myself doing at times. To see people become great "imitators" of the education system is something I never truly thought about until reading but upon retrospect it is quite jarring as I think of how people give up "themselves" and then turn toward their educators for how to act and think. This critique of the education system and those students that follow its coattails so closely is on some level a bit too critical insofar that one may still be able to learn and adapt while still being true to yourself and keeping your own beliefs. Overall it's a very poignant point and one that I'll keep in mind when looking to the education system and the scholarship children so highly praised.

"The Pain Scale"

"The Pain Scale" by Eula Bliss is an interesting read to say the very least and does a fairly good job of making the reader think about what exactly defines pain through various examples as she goes through the different numbers of the pain scale. Although Eula isn't exactly very linear in her thought pattern as she goes on through the scale and it at times comes off as confusing she nonetheless is able to convey and makes us question ourselves and our conventional understanding of pain. Her anecdotes are interesting and sporadic but still serve as an interesting quirk to her essay as she evolves the pain higher and higher through her essay.

One of the points that most stuck out to me as Eula talked about the pain scale was her paralleling the various levels to the levels of Hell, as described in Dante's Inferno, as she goes through her essay but then suddenly making note that there is no tenth level of Hell as she goes on to talk about the final threshold of pain. Perhaps it is due to my own religious side of the issue that I find this a very interesting point of note, that is to say to compare the pain scale and the levels of Hell side by side and then to state that there is no actual tenth level as if to totally make the comparisons she had made arbitrary. I can imagine that this is a sort of indirect statement then that the tenth level of pain is left to our imagination and something that will never be explicitly known or stated. To put it this way, although no one will ever be able to directly prove that they are or are not experiencing the greatest pain imaginable people as a whole will always have the idea that there is indeed a greatest pain possible beyond what they are experiencing no matter the pain they are in. This is a parallel to Dante's Inferno in that although we look at the Devil and his locked state in ice as the final level of Hell as described in the story, one can also wonder if there is a level even deeper in the depths of Hell as in the story he was not able to delve any further than the described level. Perhaps there is a level of hell reserved for those that are even more despicable then those who betrayed the son of God, a special place where one is tortured beyond what had been previously described for their awful crimes against heaven. The imagination is perhaps the biggest reason why then that we refuse to quantify ten or the max to anything because we are to be honest an unsure people. When we quantify the max to anything then that means that is the end, there is no beyond that and we must work around the known maximum. It is then the fear of the max and our imagination of the true that keeps all our numbers quantifying in reality between 1-9 on the pain scale.

Evolution of Schizophrenia Treatment (17th to 21st Century)

When we look at schizophrenia in this day and age we look at it as an unfortunate disease that a select few have unfortunately been inflicted with and that we, as the understanding and civilized people we are, must understand that they have a problem that must be accepted and treated. Now compared to the 17th century thinking this was to say the very least near nonexistent, the very thought that one must make consolidations toward what was viewed as a menace to society was foolhardy thought. This sort of disparity between now and then in the treatment of those with schizophrenia can be noted at the very least for how staggering it is in scope, to come so far in our treatment is a sort of testament in the growth of understanding people have obtained.

When one looks at the evolution of treatment one must keep note that the introduction of many of the facilities to help treat many mental diseases such as schizophrenia were actually rooted in an attempt to try to isolate and exclude them from society. Insane asylums and hospitals for example in the 17th century were used for the most part as containers for people with schizophrenia. This inevitably lead to a feeling of fear and misunderstanding as people came to only understand that people with mental diseases such as schizophrenia were to be isolated from the population. When we compare this sort of tact to today where there is an almost limitless amount of resources and information spread about every known mental disease and an active push by many organizations for people to understand these diseases it's astounding to see.

Whether we actively think about it or not we as a society have come to evolve to accept and work around those that have issues outside of their control. Whether this be in changing the form of how we act or changing the environment to accommodate them, in today's day it is simply a fact that people try their best to make everyone fit into society. To try to compare this line of thought to 17th century thinking is a task of monumental proportions due to how much of our behavior has evolved. When one thinks about treatment of schizophrenia in the 21st century for example, almost none think about an intrusive surgery that would result in the destruction of the frontal cortex of the brain along with destroying the very part of patients' brains responsible for judgment, emotional control, and personality but rather one would think to try medical treatment and psychotherapy. Though that is the issue, that sort of procedure back in the day was seen as the primary and perhaps best way to deal with schizophrenia and other mental diseases. Something today we would see as disgusting to even consider were the main source of treatments and all in all it's very jarring.

To put it lightly and to conclude, our view and treatment of schizophrenia has dramatically changed from the 17th century and it's an interesting but perhaps a little morbid to see how much we have evolved.