History of Mental Health Stigmatizations

Historical and Cultural Practices in Treating Mental Illnesses

It is not a secret that one’s emotional wellness can greatly impact their daily life, yet treatments to improve wellness have historically not been standardized. Treatments vary by certain phenomena, including but not limited to: culture, age, gender, and religion. Many cultures perceived mental illnesses as a form of punishment by a higher order, whether that be by a god or deity of some sort. As such, medical procedures were formulated on the basis of eradicating dark spirits and unholy presence. This ideology was especially prominent during the Middle Ages, in which treatments such as lobotomies and trepanning took precedence. These practices involved treating individuals suffering from a mental illness by severing the connection to the brain’s prefrontal lobe through the eye (lobotomy) or by purposefully making holes within the skull to release pressure (trepanning). Using these procedures as references, the idea of mental wellness and illness were present, but thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued through bad medicinal practices, leading to the demise of many.

The Impact of Medicinal Misinformation

From this period on forward, it became routine procedure to institutionalize people deemed “mental” in asylums, as they were perceived as being unfit to function in society. However, these asylums did much greater harm to an individual than any potential relief it may have provided, as asylums also utilized unorthodox and harmful ‘medical practices’ such as hydrotherapy, shock therapy, metrazol convulsion, alongside many others. These institutions were kept under poor management, beggarly sanitary conditions, and strict authority, with patients being treated as animals.

Unfortunately, the impact these years have caused is long withstanding. The harsh stigmatization and denotation of those suffering from mental illnesses transcended centuries, and can even be witnessed within our modern generation, even if implicitly present as internal biases. Through the efforts of figures such as Dorothea Dix, who centered her ambitions around the deinstitutionalization of mental health hospitals and asylums, she was able to initiate a global movement that addressed the issue of inhumane treatment of those suffering from mental health issues, and led to the later formation of Mental Health American (MHA), which is now responsible to the management of people that require services and the facilitation of safe, assessable, and reliable care.

Combating Prejudice

The question of our current generation is how to now address mental and emotional wellness dilemmas and how to develop efficient mannerisms in discussing our inner thoughts and emotions without innate stigmatization. The Children’s Health1 page offers five meaningful approaches on tackling this issue, all of which center around one key concept: communication. By educating our youth and allowing ourselves to be open to communicating with one another, we begin to normalize and expand the boundaries of our imagination and become open to this ongoing discussion of mental health. By being comfortable with speaking about this issue, we allow others to use our own initiatives as an outlet to follow through with this movement themselves, and thereby enable them to speak up about their own experiences.

Specific ways to promote mental health include:

• Early childhood interventions (e.g. providing a stable environment that is sensitive to children’s health and nutritional needs, with protection from threats, opportunities for early learning, and interactions that are responsive, emotionally supportive and developmentally stimulating)

• Support to children (e.g. life skills programmes, child and youth development programmes)

• Socio-economic empowerment of women (e.g. improving access to education and microcredit schemes)

• Social support for elderly populations (e.g. befriending initiatives, community and day centres for the aged)

• Programmes targeted at vulnerable people, including minorities, indigenous people, migrants and people affected by conflicts and disasters (e.g. psycho-social interventions after disasters)

• Mental health promotional activities in schools (e.g. programmes involving supportive ecological changes in schools)

• Mental health interventions at work (e.g. stress prevention programmes)

• Housing policies (e.g. housing improvement)

• Violence prevention programmes (e.g. reducing availability of alcohol and access to arms)

• Community development programmes (e.g. integrated rural development)

• Poverty reduction and social protection for the poor

• Anti-discrimination laws and campaigns

• Promotion of the rights, opportunities and care of individuals with mental disorders