Loboto-no

Amy and Rachel are two millennials who share a passion for the creepy and the spooky. They discuss creepy treatments in psych wards, including electroshock therapy and lobotomy. They also share a cocktail recipe called the brain hemorrhage shot. Electroshock therapy involves electrical stimulation of the brain under anesthesia and has a success rate of 80-85%. It can cause temporary memory loss and difficulty learning. Lobotomy, on the other hand, involves cutting or scraping brain tissue to treat mental illness. It was popular in the 1930s-1950s and was administered in an inhumane manner. The FDA has banned the use of electroconvulsive therapy for self-injury or aggression due to its risks and lack of effectiveness. There is ongoing research on the use of LSD for treating PTSD. Hello, I'm Amy and I'm Rachel, and we're just two millennials who share passion for the creepy and the spooky, harbor a true love for true crime, and share our favorite spirits. So sit back and have a cocktail with two creepy ghouls. Thank you so much. So what's our topic for today? Today our tropic, I wish I was in the tropic, our topic is lobotomy. How about lobotomy? No. You're very proud of yourself on that one, thank you. I was just like, haha, little play on words there. But we're basically going to be talking about creepy treatments in psych wards. Yes. Which there is creepy treatment aplenty. Yes, unfortunately. Yes, there is. It's just amazing what people thought would cure the mind. Yeah, and what's a good cocktail to go with this? So the cocktail I chose for this week, as I'm twiddling my fingers in a maniacal way, is called the brain hemorrhage shot. Is that in bad taste? I don't know. Who's to say? Who's to say? Who can judge really? But it is one ounce of peach schnapps, one ounce Irish cream liqueur, and two to three drops of grenadine. You know, I actually made this last night just because I was experimenting and it looks disgusting when you do it. Oh my god. Because you're dealing with peach schnapps, a nice clear liqueur, and then you're mixing in an Irish creamer-like liqueur and it looks gross. Your brain hemorrhage probably does. Yeah, exactly. But it's actually very sweet. And I will say, the Irish creamer I used, because I had some minis that I had gotten from a gift one time, and so it was Irish cream, but it was mango flavored. So it was super fruity. So I mixed that with the peach schnapps and the grenadine syrup, and it was very peachy, I will say, but very sweet. Okay, I don't like that. It was sweet, but it was a good shot. I mean, again, I wouldn't have it as a drink drink necessarily, but as a shot. A fun little shot to do, especially with the Halloween season coming upon us. Yep. Oh yeah, for sure I would do it. I mean, they're very fun, but just get past the looks and just close your eyes and do it. And take a swig. I like it. Mm-hmm, it burns so good. Who do you want to go first? Let's see, do you want to actually do a little back and forth here? Sure. So I can start us off with, I'll start us off and then I'll have you do your bit, because I know you do have a good portion of what you're going to do. So I'm going to talk about electroshock therapy. Do it. And it's also known as electroconvulsive therapy, ECT. And it's a medical treatment most commonly used in patients with severe major depression or bipolar disorder that has not responded to other treatments. It involves a brief electrical stimulation of the brain while the patient is under anesthesia. Again, key here, they are under anesthesia when it is performed. A number of treatments, it usually takes 6 to 12 treatments, and the success rate is 80 to 85%. So, was that really true? I have mixed emotions on this, honestly. Okay. So, as the name describes, electroshock therapy involves electrical currents that pass between electrodes, electrodes which are placed on the patient's scalp. And the currents can cause brief seizures lasting a few seconds. During ECT, the patient is asleep under general anesthesia, so they don't feel anything. And so I have here, what are the harms of electroshock therapy? So ECT has some risks. It has been associated with temporary memory loss, temporary difficulty learning. Some have issues remembering events that occurred in either the weeks before or just even events that happened a while back before the treatment or earlier. And in most cases, memory improves within a couple of months. But it's one of those things where you can't really, it'll come back eventually, but who knows how long that'll be. Yeah. It is kind of, I think if you were, had like, I'm thinking PTSD really bad and you're wanting to get rid of like a bad memory or a bad experience. Honestly, that could be a benefit to you. Well. But I am going to read an account from an article that I have here. So, it was just too much to try to summarize, so I'm just going to read it. Read away. Read me a story. Basically, this article is talking about treatments through the decades. And so this one goes from 1930 to 1950. And it goes into ECT. And the use of certain treatments for mental illness changed with every medical advance. Although hydrotherapy, metrazole convulsion, and insulin shock therapy were popular in the 1930s, these methods gave way to psychotherapy in the 1940s. By the 1950s, doctors favored artificial fever therapy and electroshock therapy. Describing the process of electroshock in 1957, a patient wrote as follows. Patients were generally electroshock treatment twice a week, two days for the women, Mondays and Thursdays, and two days for the men, Tuesdays and Fridays. Promptly at 730, treatment patients were rounded up by the cry, treatment patients get to the door. Begging, pleading, crying, resisting, they were herded into the gymnasium and seated around the edge of the room. Between them and the shock treatment table was a long row of screens. The table on the other side of the screen held as much chair for most of these patients as the electric chair in the penitentiary did for criminals. In order to save time, one or more patients were called behind the screen to sit down and take off their shoes, while the patient who had just preceded them was still in the table going through the convulsions. That shake of the body after the electric shock has knocked them unconscious. One attendant stands at the head of the table to get the rubber heel in their mouth so they won't chew their tongue during the convulsive stage. On either side of the table stand three other attendants to hold them down. The only comforting thing from these times was the sight of them on the quieter and more controlled patients, comforting the terror-stricken ones. I can remember many a friendly hand placed on mine, many a comforting shoulder I leaned against while I waited my turn. This has changed somehow, now I am glad to say, and treatments are not quite so inhumanely administered. But I hope to see the day when they will be entirely replaced by new drugs now coming into use as tranquilizers. Isn't that, like, yeah, that's just, that's so sad to me. You know, just imagine a bunch of people in a gymnasium waiting their turn to go, and they're just, they're, you know, they're terrified. And then they're taking off their shoes, getting ready on the table while seeing someone else. Oh, like, and seeing what's going to happen to them, yeah. Yeah, and then people are holding them down, some are being comforting, but to me that's just, that's horrible. Yeah, that's not, um, therapeutic at all. No, I, so that's why I have mixed emotions about this. Well, I mean, honestly, it's not so mixed. I'm against it, personally. I just always believed it to be just, I don't believe in the practice of electrocuting somebody. No, well, I don't know if you're about to get into it. I'm trying to see if you are, but I wanted to quickly mention about, like, you know, with the PTSD thing. Yes, now, you can, please go ahead. Now, because, I mean, when I get into lobotomies, it kind of goes into that too, but, you know, they find better alternatives. And the thing now they've noticed with a lot of people, especially, like, war veterans who have severe PTSD, they've noticed that, and it's interesting, they're trying to get passed by the FDA or the Food and Drug, or, like, the, whatever, FDA and, like, some other organization. Right. Where LSD has seemed to, like, really help people with severe PTSD, like, people who wake up with night sweats, night terrors, like, reliving everything. And it's not like they take LSD constantly. They have, like, it's treatments. They have, like, four treatments of LSD, and it completely helps them. And then, but they have no memory loss. They have no, like, you know, no, like, severe side effects that have been noted yet, which is kind of fascinating, I think. Well, and I think it's fascinating, too, because it's a controlled dose. It is. It's called microdosing. Microdosing. It's not like they're putting them up. Yeah, yeah. Right. I guess it does move to their brain chemistry, and it helps them. And it's still in the early stages because you don't know how long these effects are. Studies are still, like, 10 years old. Oh, yeah. No, studies. And so you want to really see how this person goes throughout their life, really, the rest of their lives. And, unfortunately, these are, like, really young men and women who suffer, so they'll be able to see, like, the long-term effects for, like, the next 60 or so years. You know what I mean? Right. No, that's fascinating. Yeah. I was just going to conclude, really, because I didn't do too, too deep dive, and then I really got into my other two topics. But the FDA officially banned ECTs to treat self-injury or aggressive behavior on March 4th of 2020. No kidding. No joke. Saying the device is presented an unreasonable and unsubstantial risk of illness or injury. It accepted that evidence showed that ECTs were linked to significant physical and psychological risk, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical pains, burns, and tissue damage, with weak evidence to support their effectiveness as a treatment for self-injury or aggression against this risk profile. Crazy. We just now, I was, like, 30 years old. As far as the lobotomy is what we'll get to. I know. That's going to be a whole thing for me. So, please, like, tell me, help my mental health here. Tell you about lobotomy? Tell me about lobotomy. All right. Do you want to go on a journey with me? I do. All right. So, deep in archives of London's Wellcome Collection, which I'm guessing is, like, their medical collection, there's a great treasure trove of medical curiosities, and there's a small white cardboard box. Inside is a pair of medical devices. They are simple. Each consists of an 8-centimeter steel spike attached to a wooden handle. These two gruesome things are lobotomy instruments. Nothing sophisticated. It's not rocket science, is it? These spikes once represented the leading edge of psychiatric science. They are seen as operative tools in lobotomy, often as a leucotomy, an operation which is seen as a miracle cure for a range of mental illnesses, which we'll get to. Actually, it has been noted that for millennia, like many, many years before this, mankind has practiced tread panning, drilling holes into skulls to release evil spirits. Oh, God. But the idea of lobotomy is a little bit different. The Portuguese neurologist Igoz Moniz, Moniz, M-O-N-I-Z, believed that patients with obsessive behavior were suffering from thick circuits in the brain. So in 1935, in a Lisbon hospital, he believed he had found a solution. Quote, I decided to sever the connecting fibers of the neurons in activity. His original technique was adapted by others, but the basic idea remained the same. Surgeons would drill a pair of holes into the skull, either at the top or side, and push a sharp instrument, a leucotomy, into the brain. The surgeon would sweep this from side to side to cut the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain. Moniz reported dramatic improvements for his first 20 patients. The aspiration was seized on with enthusiasm by American neurologist Walter Freeman, who became an evangelist for this procedure, performing the first lobotomy in the U.S. in 1936 and then spreading it across the globe. The reason for its popularity was simple. The alternative was worse. This is a quote from a retired neurosurgeon. When I visited mental hospitals, you saw straight jackets, padded sails, and it was patently apparent that some of the patients were, I'm sorry to say, subjected to physical violence. The chance of a cure through lobotomy seemed preferable to the life sentence of incarceration in the institution. So the whole theory behind it wasn't purely evil. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I can see that. So it was called leucotomy, but then Walter Freeman, the guy who brought it to the U.S., he's the one that renamed it the lobotomy. It doesn't really say why. But he modified the surgery by introducing the use of a surgical tool instead of alcohol, creating the prefrontal lobotomy, which is what most people, like, that's what we think of, yeah. So Freeman and his partner, James Watts, performed the first lobotomy in 1936 in the United States. Later, in 1945, Freeman modified the procedure again, so about nine years later, and created the transorbital lobotomy, which he could perform quickly without leaving any scars. Isn't that crazy? That's pretty interesting. Fast forward a little bit. In 1949, so about 14 years after he came up with it, Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for inventing the lobotomy. Oh, jeez. And the operation peaked in popularity around the time. So a little spoiler alert. Lobotomies were popular from, like, 35 to about mid to late 50s, and then it steeply drops off, which we'll get to. That's scary, because that was not that long ago. No, no, it wasn't. I always pictured lobotomies to be, like, from the 1800s, if that makes any sense. Yep. So Moniz and Freeman both reported, so the big one in the UK and then the big one here, reported significant improvements in many of their patients. Although many showed no improvement, some even experienced worse symptoms, the lobotomy still took off. But from the mid-50s, it rapidly did fall out of favor, partly because of poor results, and partly because of the introduction of the first wave of effective psychiatric drugs. Decades later, when working as a psychiatrist nurse in a long-stay institution, Henry Marsh used to see former lobotomy patients and talk about how most of them hadn't really improved, because they were back in the psychiatric, yep. Which now I'm getting into, like, flow of things. So lobotomies, yes, I think I said this, were widely used from the late 30s through the early 50s, and they kind of dropped off in the late 50s. According to one 2013 research, roughly 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe in the two decades after it was invented. 60,000. Ah. But by the 1950s, the dangers and side effects of lobotomies were becoming widely known, drawing more scrutiny from doctors and the public. Some high-profile incidents helped turn public opinion against lobotomies. For example, Freeman gave Rosemary, John F. Kennedy's sister, a lobotomy that left her permanently incapacitated. Hmm. And, yeah, so she was like a vegetable forever. But I did read something, and I need to look it up to see if it's true, but her sister, not JFK, I don't think JFK ever acknowledged her. Okay. At least publicly or anything. Oops. But her sister went and visited her a lot, and she actually started the Special Olympics. I don't think Rosemary could have ever done it because she had no capabilities. Right. She didn't. But it kind of opened her eyes on the share to people with special needs. Well, and how much do you want to bet out of these 60,000 people you just said, how many actually helped? Yeah. Who really needed it, though? You know what I mean? It could have just been regular. We'll get into that. Amy, thank you so much for asking. Sorry. I'm jumping ahead. I'm jumping again. No, it's good. We'll get to that. So here we go. Lobotomy has been banned in some places, but it is still performed on a limited basis in many countries. In 1950, the Soviet Union banned the use of lobotomies because it was contrary to the principles of humanity. Other countries, including Japan and Germany, followed years later. I think it's not really done here, but it is technically not banned yet in the United States. What? Yeah. So in 1967, Freeman was banned from performing any further lobotomies after one of his patients suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage after the procedure, which we'll get to. But the U.S. and much of Western Europe never banned lobotomies, and the procedure was still performed in these places throughout the 1980s. Today, they are rarely performed, though, although they are still technically legal. Isn't that crazy? Chilling. Yeah. Chilling. Surgeons occasionally use a more refined type of psychosurgery called a caneulotomy in its place. This procedure involves targeting and altering, not fucking cutting it off, specific areas of brain tissue. But I don't want to go too much into that. Some surgeons may use a caneulotomy to treat OCD that hasn't responded to other treatments, and it's also used to help treat chronic pain. But I don't see how often it's used. I don't think it's often, though, you know? Mm-hmm. So who got lobotomies? I'm glad you asked. Wait, hold on. Who got lobotomies? So by 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies have been performed in the United States, which means the last 40,000 probably in the last, like, five years, like, the last set of it. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so, yeah. A large number of patients were gay men. More lobotomies were performed on women than men by astounding amounts. In a Swedish one, it was about 70% women, 30% men. And children were also a majority. I think I do know that. Which people did not, yeah. And I'll tell you how I know that once you continue. But a 1951 study found that nearly 60% of lobotomy patients were women. And then a limited data shows that 74% of lobotomies in Ontario were performed on women. So outstandingly. So who were some of these patients? Well, the first U.S. patient was Ms. Alice Hood Hammett, a 63-year-old homemaker from Topeka, Kansas diagnosed with agitated depression. That's according to Jack L. High in his book, The Lobotomist. The doctors told Hammett she would be committed to a hospital if she did not receive the operation because of her agitated depression. Give me a break. 63-year-old homemaker. Give me a break. That's probably everybody today. They made two holes in the side of her head and extracted cords of white matter. It took about an hour. It was deemed successful. And two months later, Freeman began calling the operation a lobotomy instead of a leptotomy. Yeah. Mrs. Hammett's husband told Freeman she was a changed woman. I'll bet she was. Yeah, she was. She could go to the theater and really enjoy the play without thinking what her back hair looked like or whether her shoes pinched. I can't. But then there's not too much follow-up because unfortunately she passed away a couple years later from like a... Was it from something separate? Yeah. It was from like a cancer or pneumonia or something along those lines. I mean, she was in her 60s. So there's that. So who was one of the youngest patients? A 12-year-old. Oh, God. In 1960, Howard Doley was brought in for the procedure because his stepmother described him as unbelievably defiant. And being a kid, you don't. And among other things, he objects to going to bed and does a good deal of daydreaming. Who doesn't? After Howard's stepmother visited with Dr. Freeman, he suggested that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of a transorbital lobotomy. Howard's stepmother convinced her husband, like Howard's actual father, that it was the best thing for a son and then gave the doctor's approval. So Howard took decades to recover from the surgery. He was institutionalized, incarcerated, and was eventually homeless and an alcoholic. But he eventually did sober up and receive a college degree and became a California State Certified Instructor for a school bus company. But he, I didn't add too much more of it, but he said that it really, really obviously changed him. It did change him. It did not help. It did the opposite. It's just bad parenting. But I'm pretty sure they counted that as a success, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. He had to, like, you know, be homeless and roam the streets and get involved in alcoholism before he got better. So what was the last recorded lobotomy in 1967? So theoretically, there's not been any since then, even though it's still technically legal. But this is last recorded. So in 1967, Freeman received a visit from, yes, a woman, Helen Mortensen, who was one of his first 10 transorbital patients in 1946. So she's coming back to him 21 years later. She suffered a relapse from her psychiatric symptoms in 1956, and Freeman gave her a second operation. So after several more years of working productively, she wanted a third lobotomy. Oh, my gosh. Freeman did the surgery and severed a blood vessel in her brain. Three days later, she died. The hospital then revoked Freeman's surgical privileges, and he retired soon after. So clearly, the... Why would you think three? Yeah, I don't... Honestly, two... Two, I should have done it, yeah. No, one was enough. So that is the terrifying history of lobotomies. I know. Just take your brain hemorrhage shot. So what'd you think about that? Well, I knew a bit about it. Well, here's how I knew about the children, because I watched... Do you know the show Lore on Amazon? Yeah, I know of it. I've never seen it. I watched the first season, and the second episode is about Freeman and lobotomies. Oh, really? And they do reenactments, and it's been a while since I watched it. But I did the first season. It's just amazing. But especially with, like, the reenactments and, like, these are true stories and true things, accounts that happen. But I remember there was, when one of the reenactments, there was this girl, woman, and she was talking about her child. And I was like, he doesn't listen to me. It's, like, basically what you said. Literally Howard, yeah. Yeah, it was Howard. But they didn't depict him in the reenactment as a 12-year-old. They depicted him as a 5-year-old. Oh, God. Which... That may have been a little strange, but I don't know. I don't know. That's probably added to our factor. That's probably a strange thought. But... But we'll take it. For sure. It's the same thing, really. It's a kid being a child. It's a child. Their brain hasn't fully developed at 12. No, it's not. And that's just behavior of a kid being a kid and not wanting to go to bed, not wanting to brush their teeth when they want to. It's called just parenting. Deal with it. I know. So that's how I knew about that. Okay. By watching that episode. So when you said that, I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm getting flashbacks. But it does, because, like, movies and shows, it shows, like, how, you know, back in the 50s, it's like, oh, my woman doesn't enjoy making dinner and feeding. She must be super depressed. Here, give her a lobotomy. Right. Right. And, like... And they did. When you mentioned that the gay men, I wonder if that was because they did all kinds of things. Trying to fix. Yeah. You know, which there was not a problem. Yeah. There is not. You know what I mean? Because they did have treatments back then, like, even injections, I think you could do to, like, make you better, to make you, you know, if you were, say, if you were a woman that, you know, you were a lesbian and you didn't want to be. Oh, like testosterone or estrogen or something like that. Yeah. I think they did. I believe that. Yeah. So I just know that from Downton Abbey. Great show, by the way. But that's just terrifying to me. Isn't it? Just... It angers me. I know. So what are you going to talk about next? So I have some honorable mentions here on some therapies that I'll get into. But first, I'm going to cover hydrotherapy. And let me just make sure. So hydrotherapy is a general term that encompasses all therapies that use water. While aquatic therapy specifically uses, refers to physical therapy performed in a pool. So aquatic therapy, think about exercising in a pool at the Y. Water aerobics. Water aerobics. Water aerobics. Perfect example. And so some of these treatments I'm going to get into are pretty horrific. And some, they don't sound that bad. But we'll do a deep dive here. So first, I'm going to talk about the horrific waterboarding. Before it was a violation of the United Nations Convention against torture. Actually, before the U.N. even existed, there was a wet form of shock therapy for mental health disorders. Hospitals used hydrotherapy or the water cure throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. In one version, hospital personnel held patients underwater until they lost consciousness. After which they were considered cured of their madness, provided that they could be revived. Other forms were consisted of drinking, or not drinking, dunking, showering, reclining patients without warning. It isn't clear how nearly or completely drowning was supposed to help. But back in the day, it was all the rage among the anti-insanity set. And that's my honorable mentions. But first, I'm going to keep doing all the things on hydrotherapy before I get into the honorable mentions on therapy. Okay. Which, they're a riot. And can't wait. Yep. So hydrotherapy continued. Exposing patients to baths or showers of warm water for an extended period of time often had a calming effect on patients, which I can see that. Warm, continuous baths were used to treat insomnia, suicidal intentions, and agitated behavior. A patient could expect a continuous bath treatment to last from several hours to several days, or sometimes even overnight. Continuous baths were the most effective when held in a quiet room with little light and audio stimulation, causing a patient to relax and fall asleep. Bath temps ranged from 92 degrees Fahrenheit to 97 to not cause injuries to patients. Yeah. So that seems pretty harmless there. In other words, packs consisted of sheets dipped in varying temperatures of water, which were then wrapped around the patient for several hours, depending on the case. Spray functions like showers using hot and cold water. Cold water was used to treat patients diagnosed with manic depressive psychosis and those showing signs of excitement and increased motor activity. Application of cold water slowed down blood flow to the brain, causing a decrease in mental and physical activity. The temps ranged from 48 degrees to 70 degrees, which is a lot. For ice baths, for instance, do not exceed 15 minutes. They can be effective in two to five minutes to feel the effects, so you really shouldn't be in there longer. Yeah, don't stay in there a long time. No, not at all. But we're going to get into showering. In the 9th century, we had the great invention of plumbing. And in the 17th century, Flemish physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont would plunge patients into ponds or the sea. His inspiration was based on a story where an escaped lunatic runs into a lake. The lunatic nearly drowns, but is cured. Helmont concluded that water could stop the too violent and exorbitant operation of the fiery life. He started stripping his patients naked, binding their hands and lowering them headfirst into the water. This method, not practical or safe, made many drown. But modern plumbing brought hydrotherapy methods. In the 19th century, doctors were having it on the brain as the side of madness. They were having that the brain was the side of madness. Instead of plunging the entire body into water, some would direct cold showers onto patients' head to cool their hot brains. The simplest technique required an attendant to pour water over the head of a strained patient. Physicians devised elaborate methods like Scottish physician Alexander Morrison's douché, which resembled a pod in which a patient sat with his head poking out of a hole in the top. A stream of water poured down in the patient from above. And the Belgian physician Joseph Guislain designed a shower with its water reservoir on the roof of the asylum. The patient sat bound on a chair, unable to see the attendant who would start the shower. Shock and fear was part of the therapy. Oh my gosh, that is terrifying. But now on, these don't have anything to do with hydrotherapy necessarily, but I felt they needed to be mentioned because these are my honorable mentions. I can't wait to hear my honorable mentions. Okay, so xenotransplantation. In the 1920s, when Viagra wasn't invented yet, if you were having issues getting it up, and if you could afford it, you could go to Paris to see Dr. Serge Warnoff, who would replace the man's testicles with those of a monkey. Promising that this would cure their ED, few of his patients objected to sporting animal gonads. They were told that their new testicles came from inmates, not primates. Also, many patients died after this procedure. Oh my gosh. Can you just imagine, like, you're looking up at the sky, he pulls his pants down, and you see these... Monkey? Monkey nuts. Just swinging right there. What the fuck? I... I don't know. That's horrible. Why do people still go to... whatever. Yeah, that was in the 1920s. That's really not that far away. That was like, what, a hundred years ago? Yep. Food for thought. Food for thought. Now we have the Katzenklavier. You know the viral videos of cats playing on the piano? Well, this is the opposite. Instead of several... Yeah, right, cats. Oh my god. Sorry, cheetah. Okay. Instead of several cats were lined up and tied down inside a long box, but their tails immobilized and placed through holes near a keyboard, like a conventional piano. This one had keys that, when pressed, controlled hammers. But with the cat piano, or organ, the hammers were set up to shrek the cat's tails with sharp points, causing them to emit sounds. Playing this thing was meant to lift one's mood, according to German scientist... What the fuck? ...scientist Johann Christian Rell. He was from... this was, uh, 1759 to 1813 was during a... And that's that long? Well, no, that was during his reign. Oh, okay. Like, that was just his lifespan. Okay, I wouldn't think this lasted long. I mean, God hope not. The best known user of this contraption, Rell's other invention, the word we use today, psychiatry. Oh my... are you serious? Yeah. No. Why? What the fuck's that? No. How does that... I don't know. ...accuse anyone? All I can think about is... I'm not even a cat person. That's awful. Psychiatry. Fuck it. I know, that's my dad joke. Psycho-catry. Psycho-catry. I know. Now I say it, now I feel bad. Um... Yeah. So, okay. Purposeful, uh, malaria. This is a fun one. Oh my gosh. They, uh, they on purpose give people malaria? Oh yeah. We're gonna do a deep dive there. Well, not too, too deep, but... Small deep. A nice deep. A nice paragraph deep. He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. I can't read my own handwriting. How bad is that? He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. I can't read my own handwriting. How bad is that? He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. I can't read my own handwriting. How bad is that? He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. I can't read my own handwriting. How bad is that? He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. I can't read my own handwriting. How bad is that? He could kill syphilis in a... in fewer gen... Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Let me re-read that line. In 1917, he started injecting syphilis-infected patients with malaria. And it worked, killing only 15% of his patients. Get out! And winning him a Nobel Prize in 1927. Get out! Luckily, we have penicillin, so this is no longer a treatment. Yeah, treating a disease is another disease. And he won a prize for that. Oh, yeah. Oh, and I meant to mention this when I was, like, finishing up on hydrotherapy earlier. It is no longer in use in state hospitals. It went out of favor in the 20th century. What? You mean people with malaria? No, hydrotherapy. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I had to, like, back... I had to Tarantino that, too. I got to go back to that. Okay. So, I just wanted to make that up. But, yeah. But the same thing. We don't treat a disease with another disease. There's no disease anymore. But that's not a thing. But I felt, since that kind of warped my brain, I needed to do the same for everybody else. Okay. That's pretty good. That was pretty good. Do you want me to talk about my next thing? Yes, please. All right. So, the next topic was insulin shock therapy, which, I'll be honest, I had never really heard of until I looked it up. Yeah. I don't know really what it is, I'll tell you. But I know you're going to tell me. Which, it was basically... I mean, all of these that we're talking about were all literally during the same time period. Isn't that insane? And then it all drops off in, like, the 50s. And rightfully so. But, I mean... It got slightly better. Insulin shock therapy started in, like, 1935, like, a year before lobotomies came to the US. It's just, like... I don't know why there were so many psychiatric patients, but I also think it's because they're like, oh, you aren't... You're not actually normal. I think if people were just different, oh, there's something wrong with you, you have, like, mania. Let's go get you sick. Yeah. So, insulin shock therapy, or it's also known as insulin coma therapy, was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. Oh, my God. It was introduced in 1927 by an Austrian-American psychiatrist, Manfred Sacheo, S-A-K-E-O, and used extensively in the 40s and 50s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favor and being replaced by drugs in the 60s. Those were really the 60s that helped us with, like... Creating drugs and, like, pills we could take instead. Yeah. So, in 1927, Sacheo, who had recently qualified as a medical doctor in Vienna and was working in a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, began to use low sub-coma, quote-unquote, doses of insulin to treat drug addicts and psychopaths, and after one of the patients experienced increased mental clarity after having slipped into an accidental coma, Sacheo reasoned the treatment might work for mentally ill patients. Having returned to Vienna from Berlin, he treated schizophrenic patients with larger doses of insulin in order to deliberately produce the comas. The first one was an accident, but now he's deliberately doing it. And sometimes convulsions. Sacheo made his results public in 1933, and his methods were soon taken up by other psychiatrists. Joseph Warris, after seeing Sacheo practice it in 1935, introduced it to the U.S. British psychiatrists from the Board of Control visited Vienna in 35 and 36, and by 38... 1938, excuse me... 31 hospitals in England and Wales had insulin-treated units. So in 1936, and now we're kind of hopping over the place, Sacheo moved to New York. Now he's in the United States, and promoted the use of insulin coma treatment in the U.S. psychiatric hospitals. By the late 1940s, the majority of psychiatric hospitals in the U.S. were using insulin coma treatment. So, it was a labor-intensive treatment. This is why it wasn't probably as popular or more so as lobotomies, because it required trained staff and a special unit. Patients who were almost invariably diagnosed with schizophrenia were selected on the basis of having a good prognosis and the physical strength to withstand an arduous treatment. There were no standard guidelines for treatment, because why? Different hospitals and psychiatrists developed their own protocols. So you just know it's getting ready to set up for failure. Typically, injections were administered six days a week for about two months. The daily insulin dose was gradually increased to 100 to 150 units until comas were produced, at which point the dose would be leveled out. Occasionally, doses up to 450 units were used. After about 50 or 60 comas, or earlier if the psychiatrist thought the maximum benefit had been achieved, the dose of insulin was rapidly reduced before treatment was stopped. Courses of up to two years have been documented. I like getting insulin coma. Get out. Oh, my gosh. Get out. After the insulin injection, patients would experience various symptoms of decreased blood glucose, flushing, pallor, perspiration, salvation, drowsiness, or restlessness. And then a coma, if the dose was high enough, would follow. Each coma would last up for an hour and be terminated by an intravenous glucose or via gastric tube. So basically, they'd let the man come in for an hour and then it was gone. What is that? Are we going to get into the effects on the brain that those have? No, not really, because I'm not sure what it thought it was going to do. Yeah. But seizures would occur before or during the coma. Many would be tossing, rolling, moaning, twitching, spazzing, and thrashing out. Some, of course, psychiatrists regarded seizures as therapeutic, and patients were sometimes also given electroshock therapy during the coma. So they were having anesthesia or on the day of the week when they didn't have the insulin treatment. So they're just getting everything done to them. When they were not in a coma, insulin coma patients were kept together in a group and given special treatment and attention. One handbook for psychiatric nurses written by British psychiatrist Eric Cunningham instructs nurses to take their insulin patients out walking and occupy them with games and competitions, flower picking and map reading, et cetera. Patients required continuous supervision as there was a danger of hyperglycemic aftershocks after the coma, which is why this was like really, like, it's very labor intensive. Lots of people needing to be, they're constant watch. So that's why it wasn't done as often. But a few psychiatrists, including Sackle, claimed the success rates for insulin coma therapy of over 80% of treatment of schizophrenia. A few others argued that it nearly accelerated remission in those patients who would undergo remission anyway. The consensus at the time was somewhere in between the claimant's success rate, about 50% of patients who had been ill for less than a year with no influence on a relapse. The hypoglycemia that resulted from the insulin coma therapy made patients extremely restless, sweaty, and liable to further convulsions and aftershocks. In addition, patients invariably emerged from the long course of treatment grossly obese because of all the fucking insulin. Oh, yeah. And probably due to the glucose reduced, or glucose rescue induced storage disease. Which I might click on to look up a little more into. The most severe risks of insulin coma therapy were death and brain damage resulting from their irreversible or prolonged coma, respectively. A study, you're not supposed to be in a coma. Like, you're not at all. That's your body trying to, like, save itself. A study at the time claimed that many of the cases of brain damage were actually therapeutic improvements because they showed loss of tension and hostility. So, it's part of their 80% success rate. Mortality risk estimates varied from about 1 to 4.9%. So, they didn't die as much as the Blavatsky patients, but I'm not giving them any credit. No, no, no. Although coma therapy had largely fallen out of use by the 1970s, it was still being practiced and researched in some hospitals. It may have continued for longer in countries such as China and the Soviet Union then. And that is my little history on the insulin shock therapy that sounds absolutely horrifying. Oh my gosh. They just let them leave a couple hundred pounds heavier. Like, yep, that's normal. That's normal. Don't worry about it. Avoid mirrors. Yeah. Just avoid mirrors. You're fine. Don't worry about it. It's great. It's great. Thank God. It's just, it's amazing to me because you just have, you're just thinking, how did you think that was going to work? Yeah. But, let's talk about it. Here's an idea. Yeah. Here's a thought. Well, mine's more of a fashionable thing, what I'm going to be talking about. Okay, do tell. Straight jackets. We all love a good straight jacket. And it is a garment shaped like a jacket with long sleeves, the ends of which can be tied behind the back to restrain a violently disturbed person, as in a psychiatric and a patient unit, so that the person does not injure themselves or anyone else. Also, special note, used in prisons, escapology, sexual bondage. Right now. That's right. The straight jacket or straight waistcoat was invented in France circa 1770. The garment with very long sleeves crossed over the chest and tied or buckled at the back was originally made from canvas or leather, hashtag fashionista, designed to protect inmates from harm but still allowing a little mobility. Was used internationally for treatments in hospitals and asylums in the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period, non-restraint reformers and many psychiatric professionals campaigned for more moral treatment that did not involve the straight jacket. And in the 1960s, they decreased in use. I shouldn't say they... Yeah. They just decreased in use. So due to the spread of the anti-psychiatry agenda into pop culture, was used as a prop for death-defying sense by Houdini. In the 1910s, the straight jacket became known, very popular in escapology, which is thus just a practice of escaping restraints or various traps. That's simple. It is what it sounds like. Harry Houdini is the most known for this. However, it was his brother, Theodore Hardeen, who was the first magician to conceive escaping from a straight jacket in front of the audience versus behind the curtain, which was what I think Harry did a lot of. Yes, I have a little summary on that. Okay. You're saying the same thing, yeah. Yeah. Harry took the stunt further, though, by escaping from one while suspended from a crane above Manhattan in front of thousands. So what is the little tidbit you want to add? Oh, so yeah. It's the only other thing to add to that is like, so straight jackets either had a back or a crotch strap to either down this way or through the back is where the straps are to get out of. Yeah, I think I have seen the crotch one. So it is actually not necessary to be able, you do not have to dislocate one shoulder to gain the slack necessary to pull an arm out of the sleeves. And that is what Harry Houdini and his brother figured out. And I have the same thing. Escape artists around the world commonly continue to use the room or spice up the escape without dislocating the shoulder. It is sometimes possible to get more room by pulling at the side of them as they are being strapped or by keeping an elbow held outward to gain slack in the sleeves when the arm is relaxed. Another way to gain slack is to take and hold a deep breath while the jacket is being done up. And then when they are done, you like relax. And that was kind of what Harry Houdini and them did. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And then it talks a little bit, but yeah, I have the Harry Houdini person behind certain forcing the audience to listen to thumps while watching a billowing curtain for many minutes. He found the trick went over better when the audience could see his struggles. In a few of his more later and popular acts, he performed the straight jacket escape while hung upside down from a crane. And also did the same when placed in a sealed milk can, which was filled. Houdini and many other illusionist acts showed the straight jacket in action in a variety of ways. I just keep thinking of Michael Scott in an episode where he was trying to do that. He's in the straight jacket. Yeah. And he drops the key and then Jim like hides it under his shoe. Yeah. And so then he's just like rolling around on the floor and then they all disperse. And you later see him when he's doing his interview with the camera and he goes, by the way, if anybody sees the key, please let me know. And it airs messy after trying to get up. But yeah, I would be like, nobody help him. Yeah. Everyone knows. He needs to learn. But I do have another little bit on horror cinema and the punk aesthetic. Do it. So the horror cinema, the straight jacket became associated with horror, famously in the silent horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920. In the film, Francis, our protagonist, reveals a murderer spirit ground hypnotist to be the director of the insane asylum. Then the hypnotist slash director is confronted by the doctors of the asylum who then wrestle him into a straight jacket and confine him to a cell. And then it kind of became more of like seen as horrific. Yeah. Like that's what we know in pop culture today. And it's meant to be torturous. Right. Exactly. And punishment. Yeah. Inhumane. Yeah. So we also have the punk aesthetic, which I hope this was really cool. The straight jacket as a subculture symbol grew in the 1970s and the godfather of shock rock, Alice Cooper, wore one on stage. That's right. And this evoked both theatrical approach by Houdini and its psychiatric connotations. It was adopted by punk culture as a metaphor for societal restraints and controls that punk wanted to make this visible and escape. And the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, a.k.a. also John Lydon, wore a straight jacket in 1976 and Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren adopted the straight jacket as a punk fashion item, which was worn by the band and sold in their shop, Sex, which I would shop there. Yep. John Lydon wore the iconic Destroy Straight Jacket shirt in the band's infamous God Save the Queen video in 1977. That's pretty good. I like that. But that totally makes sense. I totally remember watching I Love the 70s and the straight jacket. That is very punk and it is a very blatant metaphor for punk. It really is. Yeah. If you think about it. Well done. Well done. I'm like, well done. And I mean, you see that in concerts and in a lot of heavy metal today. Yeah. Movies, shows? Yeah. Oh, I have a list here. We both have one. Sorry for the confusion. Yes. And I was going to say, in that one, what makes that really horrifying shock treatment is because when they initially do that to the main character, they do not use anesthesia. Yeah. It was meant to be a punishment for him and they wanted him to feel all the shocks they were going through him. Yeah. And then I do have one side note from one of my favorite Cuckoos. I have a friend who's read the book and he said, if you like the movie, the book's 10 times better. I think I've heard that. People say that. Because the book is written through the perspective of a Native American. Yeah. She's perspective. Yeah. And so I'm also going to give kind of a brief synopsis, or just a summary, not a synopsis, because in case you want to watch these. So One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was 1975 and it stars Jack Nicholson. And in the fall of 1963, a Korean war veteran and criminal pleads insanity and is admitted to a mental institution where he rallies up the scared patients against a tyrannical nurse. Nurse wretched. Nurse wretched. But he chooses the insane asylum over prison. Prison. Yeah. Yeah. So it is a very, it's very big drama. I mean, I've seen it, but it is, but it depicts, you know, shock trip, the ECT shock treatment So that's where you can see that. Because that's the one I'm going to recommend. I'm also going to say A Cure for Wellness. And that film is from 2016 and it has, it depicts some hydrotherapy in it. Okay. Maybe not as some of the scenes you'll see in this film necessarily, but I just thought it fit into the theme. And that film is about an ambitious young executive sent to retrieve his company CEO from an idyllic but mysterious wellness center at a remote location in the Swiss Alps, but soon suspect that the spa treatments are not what they seem. Wow. And that is like a horror thriller mystery. So give that a whirl. We have the jacket from 2005 and that's where we get our straight jacket scene. A Gulf veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals where he becomes the object of a doctor's experiments and his life is completely affected by them. Adrian Brody is in that one. Keira Knightley. Give it a watch. And for shows, I haven't watched it, but I know you have. What? Ratched. Yeah. From 2020, the Netflix miniseries. Oh, okay. But it shows a lobotomy. It shows them performing a lobotomy in like a classroom. And that was really fascinating. And so it shows how they were at the beginning. Yeah. And I thought they would also depict other treatments that we've kind of touched on a little bit here. And that is, it takes place, it's on Netflix. In 1947, Mildred Ratched begins working as a nurse at a leading psychiatric hospital, but beneath her stylish exterior lurks a growing darkness. So consider that a prequel, if you will, to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah. Which is her origin story, if you will. And as I mentioned earlier, Lore, it's on Amazon Prime. Season one, episode two, the episode's called Echoes. And that one talks about Dr. Walter Freeman, father of the ice pick lobotomy. Yeah. So give that a watch. And I think that's all my recommendations. Oh, yeah. No, wait. Hold on. Season two, American Horror Story Asylums. Horror Story Asylums is a really, it's actually my favorite one. It's a good one. It's really well done. That was from 2012. Oh, God. Was that long ago? Yeah. It was that long ago, because I was like, holy shit. But that is a good season. You do see a lot of depictions of, I don't know if they, yeah, you see different depictions. But that is a very haunting, horror-filled episode, or not episode, but season. So I'm plugging that as well. Okay. I've only got one other one to add. So I don't think too many people, or maybe too many people don't know about Nellie Bly, the journalist, who literally went into an asylum, put herself in there to write about all the horrible things that are happening. And so it's called, there's a movie about her on Hulu called Escaping the Madhouse, the Nellie Bly story, about how she basically goes in, pretends she's in an asylum, and writes everything that's being done. And basically, her exposure is what helped in Salem Asylums change, and realized how bad it was for them. Yeah. Because journalism, it's important. Yeah, no, for real. I agree. Undercover journalism, it can expose the injustices and the things that we need to work on in society, and really catch that stuff. So that sounds interesting. Yeah. Well, that was it. That's all I got. A lot of recommendations, I feel like, that we came up with. We did. And I've seen a lot of them, and there's some that I still have on my watch list. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's a great list, and a great cocktail, and a theme we have going on here. Because we love a good theme here at She's Creepy Ghoul. Yes, right. So thank you so much for listening to us. And please give us a follow on Instagram. Give us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast leads. And that really helps us to gauge how we're doing, what we need to work on kind of thing. So please follow us on Instagram. Our handle is 2creepyghouls. And we have updates, cocktail recipes, and we really appreciate you, and appreciate that you are listening to us still, if you are. So that's all we have for now. So ghouls out! Thank you.