It can be observed that the bias of this timeline is on institutionalization and psychopharmacology or use of drugs and not psychotherapy.
Source link - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/timeline/index.html
400 B.C.
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Middle Ages
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In general, medieval Europeans allow the mentally ill their freedom -- granted they are not dangerous. However, less enlightened treatment of people with mental disorders is also prevalent, with those people often labeled as witches and assumed to be inhabited by demons. Some religious orders, which care for the sick in general, also care for the mentally ill. Muslim Arabs, who establish asylums as early as the 8th century, carry on the quasi-scientific approach of the Greeks.
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1407
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The first European establishment specifically for people with mental illness is probably established in Valencia, Spain, in 1407.
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1600s
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Europeans increasingly begin to isolate mentally ill people, often housing them with handicapped people, vagrants, and delinquents. Those considered insane are increasingly treated inhumanely, often chained to walls and kept in dungeons.
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Late 1700s
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1840s
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1883
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Late 1800s
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The expectation in the United States that hospitals for the mentally ill and humane treatment will cure the sick does not prove true. State mental hospitals become over-crowded and custodial care supersedes humane treatment. New York World reporter Nellie Bly poses as a mentally ill person to become an inmate at an asylum. Her reports from inside result in more funding to improve conditions.
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Early 1900s
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1908
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Clifford Beers publishes his autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself, detailing his degrading, dehumanizing experience in a Connecticut mental institution and calling for the reform of mental health care in America. Within a year, he will spearhead the founding of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, an education and advocacy group. This organization will evolve into the National Mental Health Association, the nation's largest umbrella organization for aspects of mental health and mental illness.
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1930s
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Drugs, electro-convulsive therapy, and surgery are used to treat people with schizophrenia and others with persistent mental illnesses. Some are infected with malaria; others are treated with repeated insulin-induced comas. Others have parts of their brain removed surgically, an operation called a lobotomy, which is performed widely over the next two decades to treat schizophrenia, intractable depression, severe anxiety, and obsessions.
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1935
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Schizophrenia is treated by inducing convulsions, first induced by the injection of camphor, a technique developed by psychiatrist Ladislaus Joseph von Meduna in Budapest. In 1938 doctors run electric current through the brain -- the beginning of electro-shock therapy -- to induce the convulsions, but the process proves more successful in treating depression than schizophrenia.
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1946
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July 3: President Harry Truman signs the National Mental Health Act, calling for a National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research into mind, brain, and behavior and thereby reduce mental illness. As a result of this law, NIMH will be formally established on April 15, 1949.
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1949
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Australian psychiatrist J. F. J. Cade introduces the use of lithium to treat psychosis. Prior to this, drugs such as bromides and barbiturates had been used to quiet or sedate patients, but they were ineffective in treating the basic symptoms of those suffering from psychosis. Lithium will gain wide use in the mid-1960s to treat those with manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder.
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