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The history of the treatment of mental illness paints a barbaric portrait, one people need to see to understand how far we've come. That's the objective behind an unusual museum that opened its doors today at the State Hospital in Provo.
It's hardly therapy! The Utica crib is pretty barbaric. Patients would be locked up inside for days, even months, at a time on the theory that induced or forced sleep or rest would cure the insane.
Back then the ornate but ominous looking building in Provo was called the Territorial Insane Asylum. Janina Chilton, a hospital historian, said, "They kept trying different things, a lot of it without any scientific background, actually, to try and find something that worked."
The brain is still the last frontier of medicine, but it was even more mysterious 100 years ago. Without pharmaceuticals, tranquilizing meant restraint. They'd lock or hold you down with all kinds of devices.
While shock therapy is somewhat sophisticated today, the old devices were torturous. Crude steel wool pads conducted jolts of electricity to the head. High doses of insulin were administered to throw patients into shock.
Some of the believed causes of mental illness included too much reading, litigation with a lawyer, jealousy, and overwork, to name a few.
Patients made keys from eating utensils in an effort to escape.
Chilton says many of us simply don't realize how far we've come in defining mental illness and how to treat it. But still, she says, "We've made leaps and bounds, but we also like to point out that maybe 50 years from now, people maybe will be saying the same thing about how we treat mentally ill clients."
She hopes we'll make much more progress in the next 50 years, perhaps even find a cure for some forms of mental illness.
The new museum is inside the historic Superintendent's Home at the State Hospital and is open Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.
E-mail: eyeates@ksl.com
