The medical world is a very organic and ever-changing thing. Science improves, and we gain a superior understanding of the causes and treatments of disease. What was treated 100 years ago with something like cocaine and leeches can be treated with antibiotics or NSAIDS today. The world of mental health is very similar. The things we used to consider “crazy” can be better understood, better treated, and even de-stigmatized. And sometimes the things we used to consider disorders weren’t really issues at all.
10. Nostalgia
A whole lot of pop culture seemed to be fueled by nostalgia, this sense of sentimental warmth and attachment we have to things from our past. Whether it’s just an era or specific things like movies and music, it’s actually a big money maker as well. Just look at how shows like Stranger Things jam pack their stories with it, and retro gaming systems land with a big splash. People love loving the things they used to love.
Back in the 17th century, nostalgia was described as a mental disorder that was characterized by being uprooted, having fragmented contacts and dealing with isolation, frustration and alienation. Which, in so many words, sounds like loneliness.
The name comes from the Greek terms for homecoming (nostos) and pain (algos). Sufferers were considered manic with longing. It affected soldiers or children who had been sent to the country or really anyone who was away from home and wanted to go back. Some people even faked it in the hopes they could be sent home.
Symptoms ranged from feelings of melancholy to brain inflammation. For a time it was thought it was caused by a nostalgia bone. Treatments could range from being weaned off of whatever the patient was nostalgic for to the much less gentle sounding incitement of “pain and terror” and then later, shame.
9. Homosexuality
For younger generations, it may come as a surprise that, for many years, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. And not simply in the sense of intolerance, that there are people out there who are prejudiced against the very idea of homosexuality, but from a professional standpoint. Mental health professionals the world over had long considered it a legitimate mental disorder, and it was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, for the American Psychiatric Association until 1973. That’s the manual that lists and details all recognized mental conditions. The World Health Organization only de-listed it as a mental disorder in the year 1990.
Some viewed homosexuality as a phase towards heterosexuality that the immature basically got stuck in. Others thought it could have been caused by some prenatal defect or exposure to some kind of pathogen. Another belief held that homosexuals just have the brains of members of the opposite sex, which causes them to be attracted to the “wrong” sex.
Numerous cures were tried, some far more terrifying than others. Things like hypnosis gave way to conversion therapy and the use of reinforcement to force homosexuals into believing they were not gay. Other more aggressive and cruel methods included electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies. One doctor castrated homosexual men and then transplanted “heterosexual testicles” into them.
8. Sluggish Schizophrenia
Most people have at least a passing understanding of what schizophrenia is. Unfortunately, this is one of the conditions most people often associate with the idea of being “crazy.” It can manifest in the form of delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, behavioral issues, disorganized thinking, and more. It can very much limit or even destroy someone’s ability to function. That said, you may be less familiar with sluggish schizophrenia.
Sluggish schizophrenia was most often diagnosed in the Soviet Union and it was less a legitimate mental illness than it was a political tool. Imagine a doctor decides that you have schizophrenia and are therefore a danger to yourself and others. You need to be medicated or institutionalized. You might feel very scared of what that implies. And you might be tempted to defend yourself by saying you have no symptoms. Well, sluggish schizophrenia sidestepped that defense. It allowed doctors to acknowledge that, sure, you have no symptoms now, but you might later. Best to medicate you or lock you up now. It made for a convenient way to get rid of people who posed political problems for those in power.
Victims of the diagnoses were given painful treatments with no anesthetic or even forced into insulin comas, among other abuses.
7. American Nervousness
Despite the fact this sounds like it might fit nicely into modern society, American nervousness is no longer considered a real condition, though it was a term that existed back in 1881 when George Miller Beard wrote a book explaining it in detail.
Beard believed America had a unique set of illnesses not experienced in other countries. His characterization of American nervousness included things like susceptibility to narcotics, hay fever, tooth decay, premature baldness, diabetes and even unprecedented beauty of American women among many, many, many other things.
There were a number of causes identified by Beard, who was apparently quite a prominent neurologist, and they included environmental and social factors such as things like science, the telegraph and steam engines. He also blamed increased mental activity of women. All of these combined to overtax a person’s mind and lead them into the darkness of American nervousness.
6. Penis Envy
It’s hard to pinpoint a more controversial figure in the history of mental health than Sigmund Freud. He created the entire field of psychoanalysis and arguably evolved the whole concept of psychiatry and the treatment of mental disorders by leaps and bounds while at the same time getting so very much wrong.
In Freud’s view, nearly every aspect of human psychology had a sexual basis and women were on the inferior side of things. Women suffered penis envy because they wanted to be men. This weirdly blanket view informed pretty much all of his opinions on women, who were, in his mind, little more than incomplete men.
Freud believed penis envy manifested in women desiring their own fathers at a young age and then, later, wanting to have male children because this was as close as they could ever get to having a penis of their own. These days the entire premise is considered little more than nonsense.
5. Transgenderism
In 2019, being transgender was no longer considered a mental illness, according to the World Health Organization. Obviously, transgender people still face a number of hurdles and, in many places, a stark lack of acceptance, but they are no longer considered mentally ill by the majority of mental health professionals in the world. Instead, it was reclassified as an issue related to gender incongruence, which is essentially feeling a persistent incongruence between your assigned sex and your experience with gender.
Under these terms, the WHO still acknowledges that a transgender person may require medical assistance in some way, but that they don’t suffer a kind of pathological condition at all. The change went into effect at the beginning of 2022 and the new classification could both limit some of the stigma transgender people face and also offer up additional healthcare resources.
4. Catastrophic Schizophrenia
Yet another schizophrenia variation, this one has also been rendered defunct but was a functional diagnosis for a time. So what has to happen for schizophrenia to become catastrophic?
The condition is mostly defined as, well, really bad schizophrenia. That includes acute onset of the disorder and “devolution into a serious chronic psychosis without remission.” So it’s fast and furious and doesn’t seem to go away. It’s also referred to as “schizocaria” which leads to “rapid deterioration of personality.”
Dementia was the end result, and it occurred within two or three years of the initial diagnosis. Based on what doctor’s observation, it tended to occur most often in patients in their late teens and early twenties.
The diagnosis fell out of favor and is more generally considered just an acute onset of schizophrenia that is not likely to respond to treatment.
3. Newyorkitis
There’s a long history of mental illness being the butt of jokes, sometimes in a mean-spirited way and sometimes a little more tolerably. Few illnesses seemed to have been written off almost entirely as jokes, only to have some evidence crop up later that people took it entirely seriously, but that seems to be the case with Newyorkitis.
In the early 1900s, Newyorkitis was a nervous condition afflicting those who lived in New York. Tongue in cheek though it sounds, that didn’t stop people from offering up treatments for it. You could head to the YMCA back in 1908. As one doctor involved put it, they were using “straight psychology applied directly to the abnormal conditions of urban business and social life.”
Dr. John H. Girdner wrote an entire book on the subject, fascinated by what he perceived as a condition unique to those in New York, of all places. He said many people in the city lived an artificial life and all the noise, the pursuit of money, the tall buildings and everything considered part of that New York experience was inflaming itself in people’s mind, body and soul.
Doctors would send patients to New Jersey to have hydrotherapy baths as a cure for the condition, which apparently caused nearsightedness (from all the tall buildings), irritated ears (from the noise), and muscular degeneration along with greed and self-centeredness.
2. Hysteria
Hysteria dates back to the second century BC and is, by and large, considered the mental disease that was only applicable to women, though it’s worth noting someone did make up male hysteria at one point as well. In women, hysteria was a physical condition before it was a mental one. Way back it was actually demonological, for whatever that’s worth. It was listed in the DSM until the year 1980.
Ancient cures ranged from more sex to less sex to herbs and even fire. Sometimes marriage was considered a way to fix it. A roving uterus was blamed for it once and then Freud ushered in the idea of it being a mental condition caused by trauma and repression, And, because this is Freud, his basic reasoning was that female hysteria was a result of women not having a penis. If traditional methods of curing the condition didn’t work, then the idea of uterine massage was offered up. That involved, as you might suspect, massaging the uterus. This came from a technique first developed to treat a prolapsed anus and involved some fairly invasive manual stimulation. Clinics used to treat over 100 patients per day.
1. Drapetomania, the Slave Disease
The first slave ship arrived in America in 1619 and for the next 246 years, until the passing of the 13th Amendment, slavery was perfectly legal. During that time, slaves were not regarded as people, but that didn’t stop some backward thinking doctors from trying to both treat them as people and then act like they were broken in some way for not wanting to be slaves. Chiefly, this was the work of Samuel A. Cartwright.
Cartwright was a medical doctor and believe there must have been some disease at play for any slave who tried to flee bondage. He called this condition drapetomania and it could be cured by slave owners whipping it out of their slaves or cutting off their toes.
The lengths Cartwright went to in an effort to justify slavery from a scientific point of view are shocking by today’s standards. He claimed, medically, that a slave was incapable of being happy unless they were a slave and that they had immature nervous systems and small brains.
All of this fed into the propaganda spread by slave owners that slaves were actually benefitting from their position and that slave owners were basically doing their slaves a favor.