Posted: Mar 29, 2010 1:22 pm
Agrippina wrote:
Thousands of years ago,
Agrippina wrote:when I did my nursing training in a psycho ward, Freud was very popular and of couse it was also the reason that most people refused to have therapy. His theories didn't do very much to convince people to get themselves attended to for depression for instance, and it was only when people attempted suicide that they actually got some sort of treatment.
Is electro-shock therapy still used these days? In those days people practically had their brains fried with that treatment.
It is still used today, but it is pretty controversial and there are quite a few groups lobbying for it to stop. The research on it is pretty mixed so I don't know if it has any benefits, however, I have a feeling that any significant "improvements" that they find are due to the fried brain preventing them from exhibiting problem behaviors, rather than "fixing" them, per se. Sort of like curing a child's running away behavior by cutting off their legs..
Agrippina wrote:Of course living in a country that was run by Christian Nationalists, religion was the only approved treatment for psychological problems. I suppose there aren't many of you who remember when mentally handicapped people were kept locked away in "asylums" and Down's Syndrome was called Mongoloidism. Disorders like dyslexia and autism were regarded as 'retarded' and gifted people who had autism were called "idiot savants."
we've come a long way with psychology in 50 years.
Hmm... Whilst I agree that conditions have definitely improved over the years, I think we have to be careful not to judge people for using terms such as "retarded", "spastic" etc as they were valid medical terms that did not carry the same connotations as they do today. The problem is that the words are associated to the people who carry the labels, so the terminology needs to change every decade. "Retarded" means the exact same thing as "developmentally disabled", it's just that DD hasn't been around long enough to have the same negative associations. As a demonstration of my point, your use of the term "mentally handicapped" is now highly discouraged, although you probably didn't realise as it was the standard term used during your training.
It's a weird old world, I guess
