As a person who has suffered with severe mental illnesses for the past 25 years, I am keenly aware of the ignorance and stigma that sadly still exist in our modern societies.
In the past 100 years, mentally ill patients who were institutionalized were, sadly, often subjected to acts of cruelty, sadomasochism, and barbarism. Although, thankfully, there is greater oversight and better policies in place now, these wicked acts against the severely mentally ill still do happen.
If I was born in earlier times I most likely would have been confined to an asylum for decades, if not for the rest of my natural life. If we go back even further, I most likely would have been literally chained up in a dungeon.
Great strides have happened, but it has been less than 70-75 years since horrific procedures like the lobotomy were common.
Lobotomies were widely used from the late 1930s through the early 1950s. According to one 2013 research paperTrusted Source, roughly 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe in the 2 decades after the procedure was invented.
But by the 1950s, the dangers and side effects of lobotomies were becoming widely known, drawing more scrutiny from doctors and the public.
Some high-profile incidents helped turn public opinion against lobotomies. For example, Freeman gave President John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary a lobotomy that left her permanently incapacitated.
Even James Watts, Freeman’s partner who helped him perform the first U.S. lobotomy, became disillusioned with the procedure by the 1950s. At the time, medications like antipsychotics and antidepressants also became widely available.
This made it easier to provide outpatient treatment for mental illness and treat symptoms without resorting to brain surgery.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-surprising-history-of-the-lobotomy
I thank God that lobotomies have fallen out of fashion. Yet for a period this procedure was embraced by the medical community. The Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz who invented the lobotomy received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1949.
Today, thanks to new psychiatric drugs, therapy, and the consensus that the vast majority of the mentally ill can live independently on their own, instead of being warehoused in psychiatric institutions, life is better for those suffering from mental illness.
I’ve faced many challenges in my 25 years of living with schizophrenia, major depression, anxiety disorder, and PTSD. However, I can live with my dear elder sister Vi and she also has the same diagnosis as me. Our dear mother also has severe mental illness. We love and support each other. We take our psychiatric medications, see our psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, and we are living a joyful life in Christ.
I should mention that the history of the treatment of the mentally ill by the Church has been wrought with bigotry, willful ignorance, bad theology, and even hatred.
For my assessment of mental health and the Church, “The Church in Crisis: The State of Mental Health in the Body of Christ”, please see the blog post linked below:
Zach Uram's Blog 