Comments

These pictures are fantastic, i love this site!you just dont see buildings like this anymore, its a shame they have fell in disrepair...

liza-who-owns-goats, that is the funniest comment I have read yet on this site, and I wholeheartedly though sadly concur.

Going back to lurker mode. Carry on.

It's fucked up that many people want to bring back the huge institutions with abusive employees, policies and procedures.

Flushed,
I too experienced institutional abuse that left me with PTSD. Its fucked up that so many people want to bring them back (not that they still don't exist in many forms.)

If it is a muscle stimulation machine as Motts says then it is probably a precursor to the TENS unit (Trancutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) that is used in physical therapy and given to athletes and people wiht constant pain.
I can see that it may also be a ECT machine. In fact it is logical that both may have come from the same research.
As for ECT it is a basically a noninvasive lobotomy. It is just as random and unpredictable and they know just as little about what is going on when they do it as they did about lobotomy's. The only way they can determine anything about either "treatment" is based on how the victim behaves after the fact.
ECT has never stopped in some countries and is making a come back in the US.

I had it done to me as a small boy age 5-7 as part of a regimen of torture and abuse while in protective custody ,and then again at the end with drugs to make me forget all the abuse and that I was ECT'd.
As you see I have remembered, and I can tell you that ECT is entirely harmful and does not do anyone any good in spite of what they might imagine. You'll see if you look it up that many victims of lobotomy said they were better too. And while it made me forget the abuse the damage that abuse causes was not removed with the memories so I had to live my life thinking that all the symptoms of abuse were my personal defects that I was born with. Not knowing why I had the problems I did and nothing anyone offered had any effect as it could never address the issues that ware hidden from me.

You may think you were helped but I assure you that you weren't the only thing that happened is that your brain was killed off in random sections and other parts were so damaged that the synapses cannot work properly. You'll sense what is there but not be able to get at it. You will think this is memory loss but it is not it is brain death and physically damaged synapses. .

i agree totally with p. 64

Untreated syphilis caused dementia. Being able to acutally cure syphilis reduced the number of the mentally ill after anti-biotics came into use.

I sleep in one every night. Being a baby of 32 years I feel very comfortable in it. I find it strange now when I sleep in a normal bed and wonder how I ever got along without it.

There was a popular theory around the turn of the last century that maddness was caused by infection, so a few hospitals would first pull any suspect teeth, then the doctors really sold on the idea would start taking out internal organs (gall bladders, ovaries, etc.) that they suspected were diseased. Ended up killing some patients with post-op complications. At least one Doctor was driven out of business at the time when other Doctors called him on it.

Really not sure that the chemical imbalance theories are much better. The imbalances occur after treatment is given and then stopped, they don't occur before in untreated schizophrenics.

Way back when someone noticed that epileptics did not become ill with schizophrenia. So if epileptics had convulsions, then giving schizophrenics convolutions might bring them out of it--that was the rationale. Like the whole history (including today) of psychiatry, no one really knows how the brain works. It is trial and error, and then no one knows what the long term effects are. Some people get over schizophrenia on their own, so for any new treatment, someone is going to be "cured" by it, then it was the go-to treatment and a if some is good more is better attitude crept in, hence the series of shocks over a period of days.

Turns out it does not work for schizophrenia, but as others have said is today a last-ditch voluntary treatment for serious depression. Have an in-law that had it years ago--suicidal depression ran in her family.

had to sneak in a 'WELCOME BACK MOTTS'