The medical world is very organic and constantly changing. Science is improving, and we understand the causes and treatments of diseases better. What was treated with things like cocaine and leeches 100 years ago can now be treated with antibiotics or NSAIDs. The mental health world is very similar. What we used to think of as “crazy” can be better understood, treated, and even destigmatized. And sometimes, things we used to think of as disorders weren’t really problems at all.
10. Nostalgia
It seems like all of pop culture is fueled by nostalgia, that sentimental feeling of warmth and affection for things from our past. Whether it’s just the era or specific things like movies and music, it’s actually a big money maker too. Just look at how shows like Stranger Things package their stories with it, and how retro gaming systems are a big deal. People like to love what they loved before.
As early as the 17th century, nostalgia was described as a mental disorder characterized by uprootedness, fragmented contacts and isolation, disappointment and alienation. Which, in so many words, sounds like loneliness.
The name comes from the Greek terms for "homecoming" (nostos) and "pain" (algos). Sufferers were considered manic with longing. This included soldiers or children sent to the countryside, or indeed anyone who was away from home and wanted to return. Some even pretended to be sent home.
Symptoms ranged from a sense of melancholy to inflammation of the brain. For a time, it was thought to be caused by the bone of nostalgia. Treatment could range from weaning the patient off what he or she was nostalgic for to the much less gentle-sounding incitement to “pain and horror,” and then shame.
9. Homosexuality
It may come as a surprise to younger generations that for many years, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. And not just in the sense of intolerance, that there are people who are prejudiced against the idea of homosexuality, but in a professional sense. Mental health professionals around the world long considered it a legitimate mental disorder, and until 1973 it was included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM. This is the manual that lists and describes in detail all recognized mental disorders. It was only in 1990 that the World Health Organization removed it from its list of mental disorders.
Some viewed homosexuality as a phase on the way to heterosexuality, in which the immature were generally stuck. Others thought it might be caused by some prenatal defect or exposure to some pathogen. Another belief was that homosexuals simply had the brains of the opposite sex, causing them to be attracted to the “wrong” sex.
Numerous treatments were tried, some far more horrific than others. Things like hypnosis gave way to conversion therapy and the use of reinforcement to make homosexuals believe they were not gay. Other more aggressive and brutal methods included electroshock therapy and lobotomies. One doctor castrated homosexual men and then transplanted “heterosexual testicles” into them.
8. Sluggish schizophrenia
Most people have at least a passing understanding of what schizophrenia is. Unfortunately, it is one of the conditions that most people often associate with the idea of being “crazy.” It can manifest as delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, behavioral problems, disorganized thinking, and more. It can severely limit or even destroy someone’s ability to function. However, you may be less familiar with low-grade schizophrenia.
Slow-onset schizophrenia was the most commonly diagnosed condition in the Soviet Union, and it was less a legitimate mental illness than a political tool. Imagine a doctor deciding that you have schizophrenia and are therefore a danger to yourself and others. You need to get treatment or be institutionalized. You might be very afraid of what that means. And you might be tempted to defend yourself by saying that you have no symptoms. Well, slow-onset schizophrenia bypassed that defense. It allowed doctors to admit that, sure, you don’t have symptoms now, but they might appear later. Better to treat you or lock you up now. It was a convenient way to get rid of people who were causing political problems for those in power.
Victims of the diagnoses were subjected to painful treatments without anesthesia or even put into insulin comas, among other abuses.
7. American nervousness
Although it sounds like it might fit well into modern society, American nervousness is no longer considered a real condition, although the term existed as far back as 1881, when George Miller Beard wrote a book explaining it in detail.
Beard believed that America had a unique set of diseases that no other country had. His characterization of American nervousness included things like drug addiction, hay fever, tooth decay, premature baldness, diabetes, and even the unparalleled beauty of American women, among many, many, many other things.
Beard, who was apparently a fairly well-known neurologist, identified a number of causes, including environmental and social factors such as science, the telegraph, and the steam engine. He also blamed the increased mental activity of women. All of these combined to overload the human mind and lead it into the darkness of American nervousness.
6. Penis Envy
It’s hard to find a more controversial figure in the history of mental health than Sigmund Freud. He created the entire field of psychoanalysis and arguably revolutionized the entire concept of psychiatry and the treatment of mental disorders, while also getting it wrong.
In Freud's view, almost every aspect of human psychology had a sexual basis, and women were on the lower side of things. Women suffered from penis envy because they wanted to be men. This strange general view shaped almost all of his opinions about women, who he believed were nothing more than inferior men.
Freud believed that penis envy manifested itself in women desiring their own fathers as young women, and then later desiring male children because that was the closest they could get to having their own penis. These days, the whole premise is considered nothing more than nonsense.
5. Transgenderism
According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, being transgender was no longer considered a mental illness. Obviously, transgender people still face a number of obstacles and, in many places, absolute rejection, but most mental health professionals around the world no longer consider them mentally ill. Instead, it has been reclassified as a problem related to gender incongruence, which is essentially a persistent mismatch between your assigned sex and your gender experience.
Under these terms, the WHO still recognizes that a transgender person may require some level of medical care, but does not have a medical condition at all. The change took effect in early 2023, and the new classification could both limit some of the stigma transgender people face and offer additional health resources.
4. Catastrophic schizophrenia
Another variant of schizophrenia that was also declared non-existent, but was a functional diagnosis for a time. So what needs to happen for schizophrenia to become a disaster?
The condition is generally defined as very severe schizophrenia. This involves an acute onset of the disorder and “a progression to severe chronic psychosis without remission.” So it’s fast and furious and doesn’t seem to go away. It’s also called “schizocaria,” which results in “rapid deterioration of personality.”
The end result was dementia, which developed within two or three years of the initial diagnosis. Based on the doctor's observations, it most often occurred in patients in their late teens and early twenties.
The diagnosis has fallen out of favor and is usually considered to be simply an acute onset of schizophrenia that is unlikely to respond to treatment.
3. New Yorkitis
There is a long history of mental illness being the subject of jokes, sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes a little more tolerable. Few illnesses have seemed to be written off almost entirely as jokes, but later there was some evidence that people took them completely seriously, but that seems to be the case with New Yorkitis.
In the early 1900s, New Yorkitis was a nervous disorder that plagued New Yorkers. Ironic as it sounds, that didn’t stop people from offering treatments for it. You could go to the YMCA as early as 1908. As one doctor involved put it, they used “direct psychology applied directly to the abnormal conditions of city business and social life.”
Dr. John H. Girdner wrote an entire book on the subject, fascinated by what he saw as a condition unique to all New Yorkers. He said that many people in the city were living an artificial life, and all the noise, the money-making, the tall buildings, and everything that was considered part of the New York experience was igniting people's minds, bodies, and souls.
Doctors sent patients to New Jersey to take hydrotherapy baths as a cure for a condition that apparently caused nearsightedness (from all the tall buildings), ear irritation (from the noise), and muscular degeneration along with greed and self-centeredness.
2. Hysteria
Hysteria dates back to the second century BCE and is generally considered a mental illness that only applies to women, although it's worth noting that at one point someone actually came up with male hysteria, too. In women, hysteria was a physical condition, not a mental one. It was actually demonological at one point, for what that's worth. It was listed in the DSM until 1980.
Ancient remedies ranged from more sex to less sex, herbs and even fire. Sometimes getting married was thought to be the way to fix it. At one point, a wandering uterus was blamed, and then Freud came up with the idea that it was a mental condition caused by trauma and repression. If traditional treatments for the condition didn’t help, then the idea of uterine massage was proposed. This involved, as you might suspect, massaging the uterus. It evolved from a technique first developed to treat anal prolapse and involved fairly invasive manual stimulation. Clinics saw over 100 patients a day.
1. Drapetomania (slave disease)
The first slave ship arrived in America in 1619, and for the next 246 years, until the passage of the 13th Amendment, slavery was perfectly legal. At the time, slaves weren't considered human, but that didn't stop some backwards doctors from trying to simultaneously treat them like human beings and then act like they were somehow broken because they didn't want to be slaves. This was largely the work of Samuel A. Cartwright.
Cartwright was a doctor and believed that any slave who tried to escape from slavery must have had some kind of illness. He called this condition drapetomania, and it could be cured by slave owners beating it out of their slaves or cutting off their toes.
The lengths Cartwright went to in trying to justify slavery on scientific grounds are shocking by today's standards. He argued medically that a slave could not be happy unless he was a slave, and that he had an immature nervous system and a small brain.
All of this fed into the propaganda spread by slave owners that slaves actually benefited from their situation and that slave owners were basically doing their slaves a favor.
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