How has our understanding of Mental Health Issues changed?

By Bella Wang

“Psychology has a short history, but a long past” – Hermann Ebbinghaus.

From the beginning of time, it was human nature to wonder. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Great thinkers as early as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle provided insight on the age-old psychological debate nature vs nurture. However, our understanding of psychology today starts in 1879, the time of the famous Wilhelm Wundt, often regarded as the father of psychology. He was the first to truly separate the field from philosophy and begin the very first school of thought: structuralism. As the name suggests, the school focused on analyzing the brain using more structured and objective measurements, laying the foundations for psychological experimentation later on. As time went on, other influential psychologists like William James, Ivan Pavlov, Sigmund Freud, John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner began to question and experiment with different psychological phenomenon, and their ideas gradually piece together to form what we call psychology today.

The four main goals of psychology: describing, explaining, predicting, and changing behavior has never been constant. This was due to the lack of prior or accurate experiments especially during the early days of experimentation on mental processes, and the definition of each goal, especially changing or controlling behaviour. A constant question that still arises is: What is normal? According to the documentary “American Experience; The Lobotomist”, Walter Jackson Freeman II was incited to perfect his lobotomy procedure after witnessing how the mentally ill were kept in ‘warehouses’ and cut off from society. He truly believed that his newly developed ‘ice pick’ lobotomy would cure their mental disorders, being both safe and easy to preform, technically. Performed under local anaesthetic or electric shock that would briefly render the patient unconscious, the overall procedure only took a few minutes and the patient would be able to walk out the door with nothing to show but black eyes. Freeman’s theory was that the ice pick, driven through the bone of the eye socket, would be then manipulated in such a way that it would damage the prefrontal lobe and destroy the connection it had with the rest of the brain. Since the lobotomy essentially destroyed the entire prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for skills including decision making, problem solving, intelligence, and emotion regulation many of Freeman's patients were never the same. Although a third of the lobotomies were successful, the side effects of the procedure included chronic headaches, seizures, dementia, and death. In 1967, Freeman was finally banned from performing any other lobotomies. Sadly, more than 75% of the lobotomies that Freeman had preformed by 1942 were on women.

The field of psychology has undeniably grown over the years and will continue to grow. We must acknowledge that many, not only medical professionals approached mental health issues differently, in a way that may not be ethical or socially acceptable today. A major reason for this was our gradual shift in societal attitude towards mental health problems, psychology, and larger overarching issues like racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Today, we are more aware of common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, OCD, and ADHD and can learn more about these topics from various sources, seek help from medically trained professionals, receive support from our loved ones.