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8 curiosities of psychiatry that may surprise you

Despite being relatively young, psychiatry is something very present in today's society, especially in the form of pharmacological treatments to treat mental disorders. In fact, it is so young that to this day there are still those who question it as a science.

Those who criticize it consider that it does not have a well-defined object of study, arguing that if psychiatry studies the brain, then it should be a branch of neurology; and if what you study is the mind, then it is a specialty of psychology.

Leaving aside the debate around it, yes we can comment some curiosities of psychiatry, both its historical antecedents and anecdotes and facts of its most modern aspect.

  • Related article: "The 8 types of Psychiatry (and what mental illnesses do they treat)"

8 curiosities of psychiatry (explained)

Psychiatry is a specialty of medicine but it has earned its independence by heart. This discipline is responsible for the prevention, evaluation, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of people with disorders mental health, with the objective of improving their health and ensuring that patients can enjoy a quality of life better. Given its object of study and intervention, it is impossible not to relate it to neurology, psychology, biology and medicine in general.

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There are many myths, anecdotes and facts that revolve around psychiatry, various curiosities that we are going to discover below.

1. Devilish Possessions and Dysregulation of Bodily Fluids

Many of the curiosities of psychiatry have to do with its history and the way in which disorders have been viewed over time. Mental disorders were long attributed a supernatural origin, being seen as the consequence of the action of an evil force. This belief was especially painful for both those with the disorder and their relatives, who believed that evil had caught them and had no chance to escape of the.

The classical Greeks, who had a more global idea of ​​health, did not think so. In Ancient Greece the body and the mind were seen as a unit, something inseparable, and for this reason they interpreted any anomaly as an imbalance in the body, whether physical or mental.

This is how Galen thought, who defended that mental disorders were the result of fluid dysregulation, considering that the mania was caused by alterations in the yellow bile and that the melancholy, or modern depression, was due to the bile black.

During the Middle Ages it was thought that mental disorders were the product of diabolical possessions. On the other hand, on the other side of the pond, in pre-Columbian America a different perspective was taken on psychic alterations, something that survives to this day in several native cultures of the continent where anomalous behaviors are seen as a kind of sign of divinity magical.

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2. Crazy people's nave

It is not known if it is a myth or reality, but there is a legend that says that, before modern psychiatry and long before it was seen in the West people with mental disorders for what they are, people, society had a particular way of "solving" the psychological problems of their citizens.

People with mental disorders, far from being well treated or hospitalized somewhere to recover, were put on ships that have been called "ships of madmen." This practice consisted of forcibly embarking people with mental disorders, making them set sail and never allowing them to set foot on dry land again.

Those who didn't get on that gloomy ship didn't have much better luck. Many of them were tied up and chained in stables or in some place cut off from the rest of society, places where they were harassed and mistreated if they caused trouble. And to top off all the horrors, when they died they were not buried in common cemeteries, since it was believed that their body was possessed and the best thing was to incinerate them.

  • Related article: "The 18 types of mental illness"

3. A chimpanzee and thousands of lobotomized brains

One of the most surprising anecdotes in the history of psychiatry involves a chimpanzee, brains, and a Nobel Prize winner.

Lobotomy is one of the most controversial practices in psychiatry, consisting of removing areas of the brain in order to "cure" mental disorders.

Its inventor was the Portuguese António Egas Moniz, Nobel Prize in Medicine, who discovered this technique by practicing with only one chimpanzee. Mr. Moniz had nothing better one day than to take a chimpanzee and remove parts of its brain, see what would happen.

Based on a single experiment and not even on human beings, a whole new technique would emerge that would be applied in hundreds of patients, changing their lives forever, in many cases for the worse.

  • You may be interested in: "What is a lobotomy and for what purpose was it performed?"

4. Unknown biological cause

At the moment, there is no medical clinical proof of mental disorders, that is, there is no blood test nor is it possible open someone's skull and discover which area of ​​their brain is altered and, from there, establish the diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression or Bipolar disorder. Mental disorders are detected based on behavior, speech, perception and symptoms reported by the patient, not based on biomarkers.

In fact, the reason we call depression or schizophrenia "disorders" and not "illnesses" is that there is no cause. unequivocal biological disease that causes these disorders, unlike diseases such as cancer (spread of tumors), COVID-19 (homonymous virus) or tonsillitis (tonsil inflammation) in which an unknown biological cause is known or attributed but evident.

Curiosities of psychiatric medicine

5. Electroconvulsive therapy still exists

Many, when they hear the word "psychiatry", the first thing they think of is electroconvulsive therapy, also known as electroshock.. It is a word that is scary, that is perceived as threatening because it plays with something as potentially dangerous as electric current. Hearing it, images come to mind of patients tied to chairs and with chews in their mouths while convulsing spasmodically.

Well, that type of electroshock existed, but it is part of the past. Nevertheless, electroconvulsive therapy still exists and it is not at all how it is painted in Hollywood- No spasms, convulsions, or shaking, just one person receiving a small current in a controlled way, to strategically change the operation of some part of your brain.

This type of therapy is used for cases of very severe severe depression, where the patient is not even able to get out of bed or wash on his own. It is also used in cases of refractory schizophrenia, when drug treatment has not worked. Whatever the disorder for which it is used, the therapy is applied in a hospital and requires general anesthesia, which means that the patient does not notice anything.

It should be said that, although today it is much milder and more controlled than it was in the past, it does not mean that it does not have side effects. Its main risk is long-term memory loss, although it is something that occurs in less than 1% of cases.

  • You may be interested in: "Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): characteristics and uses in psychiatry"

6. Transcranial magnetic stimulation

Although it has been approved since 2008 in the United States in the treatment of depression, the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) remains the great unknown even within the psychiatry.

Based on biologic perspectives, the brain of a person with depression would have a lower proportion of certain neurotransmitters (p. g., serotonin), which imply less brain activation according to which areas, especially those that are responsible for the mood.

Considering this, the objective of TMS is to get these areas to activate, to make them form more connections between them and thus reduce symptoms.

Neurons are electrochemical cells, which implies that the use of drugs stimulates them and makes them grow chemically while transcranial magnetic stimulation does it electrically.

In this type of stimulation magnets, similar to those used in an MRI, are used to produce electromagnetic currents to focus energy in the area of ​​the brain that controls the limbic system, the part of our brain in charge of our emotions.

In contrast, drugs, which enter our bloodstream and have the ability to produce effects throughout our body, TMS has the advantage that it is applied only to the specific part of the brain responsible for the depression. Thanks to this, this type of therapy is a good alternative for cases in which the use of medication can be worrying, such as antidepressants in pregnant women.

Unlike the old electroconvulsive therapy, TMS does not require anesthesia nor does it pose a risk to memorySince the magnetic currents applied in this therapy do not alter the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is believed to be responsible for the formation of new memories.

Also, unlike other psychiatric therapies, TMS is not a lifelong treatment, although it is intensive. The patients to whom it is applied must attend about 5 days to therapy each week for a period of 4 to 6 weeks, with significant improvements from the third week.

  • Related article: "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Types and Uses in Therapy"

7. Why do people stop their medication?

One of the most frequently heard questions about pharmacological treatments typical of psychiatry is why there are certain people who abandon their medication. Don't they want to be better? Do the medicines make them feel bad? Is it a symptom of your disorder?

Although there would be many explanations behind it, each one different for each type of patient, the truth is that we can summarize them in two everyday situations.

This I am going to say may shock many, but not in all mental disorders the person feels “bad”. In fact, he may feel so "good" that he wishes he was like this forever. An example is bipolar disorder, whose name used in the past suggests what happens to these patients: manic depression; there are moments of high that is the mania phase, and other moments of low that are the depressive phase.

For one thing, no one wants to manifest the negative symptoms of bipolar disorder such as depression, psychotic breakouts, paranoia, hallucinations, and irritability. On the other hand, the patient experiences the manic phase, a period in which he feels that he is going to eat the world. He feels energetic, little fatigued, climbing the emotional roller coaster hill so high that he believes he can handle absolutely everything.

It is due to the effects of the manic phase, that emotional high that the patient experiences, the person can reach the biased conclusion that these "positive" symptoms far outweigh the unwanted effects of the negative ones, and therefore they decide to abandon the medication. When they are in the manic phase they feel that they can do everything, that they can be very productive and active people and that they will know how to take advantage of what they believe is an advantage of the disorder.

But they still need to take the medication, since their symptoms are not positive no matter how you look at it. For starters, in the manic phase they can engage in very harmful behaviors such as using drugs, reckless driving, or losing control over themselves.

Added to this, the next phase, that of depression, can be so extremely profound and exasperating that the patient ends her life or, in milder cases, does absolutely nothing for a while, unable to get out of bed.

The other explanation of why there are people who abandon the medication has to do with side effects. It is no secret that all medications have adverse effects, problems that can cease to manifest themselves the moment the patient abandons the drugs.

This makes some patients decide to stop taking the medication for fear of experiencing the effects. secondary effects, even though the therapeutic effects, that is, the benefits, outweigh the drawbacks.

8. Mindfulness and psychiatry

It is no secret that he Mindfulness it is especially valued in psychology, becoming very popular in the last decade.

Mindfulness is a good tool to help patients, especially people with anxiety disorders, manage their day to day. However, despite what one might think, this type of therapeutic approach has been gaining a place in psychiatry, becoming so important that there are even psychiatrists who consider giving up the drugs to treat.

Mindfulness is based on self-awareness and meditation, techniques that are known to have served millions of people in Asia greatly. Now, the western world is introducing them in its clinical practice and approaches them scientifically, being proof of them the many studies that have pointed out the benefits of the techniques on which the mindfulness.

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