In Psychiatric Wards: Past and Present Day

We have seen it in the movies, witnessed it on tv. The psychiatric ward and the Hollywood glamor that brings it to life. The scripts and props that make the idea of a psychiatric ward more dramatic and more interesting to the general public than it is. Wipe those images out of your mind, the real psychiatric ward, is very different from the movies.

Lunatic Asylums. The modern psychiatric ward has evolved from these older, less regulated hospitals. In most cases, these asylums were a solution to families with relatives that carried a wide variety of ailments. The asylums housed people with 'hysteria' to 'madness' - in a sense, the diseases were not very sophisticated in diagnosis. People were dropped off at the lunatic asylums and the treatment there were usually quite brutal. They were places to drop of your 'less than appealing' relatives and leave them in someone else's care.

Early treatments were shocking. It would boggle the minds of those of the modern era. The doctors and scientists of early lunatic asylums spent their times trying to cure patients of their madness with very unconventional methods. Employing methods like:

• Insulin-Coma Therapy by where the doctors would induce an insulin coma for drug addiction
• Trepanation by drilling holes into the patient's skulls for 'releasing demons of madness'
• Malaria Treatment to treat syphilis. The doctor would infect a patient with Malaria tainted blood to induce a high fever that would kill the syphilis.

As these treatments began to fade out, modern psychiatric wards started to form. Patients were still dropped off for any reason and the treatment was not much better. ElectroShock Therapy was a common treatment of patients with mental illness. Nurses and doctors were known to chain patients to walls or from their hands attached to the ceiling.The patients rarely wore proper clothing or had proper meals while in the psychiatric wards.

Humane treatment of patients didn't start becoming regulated until the 1970's when the government started to take notice of the situation. Advocacy groups banned together to help get more humane practices as psychiatric hospitals became a more accepted form of treatment for mental illness.

Mental Illness is a disease that has been around for centuries and the treatments for the various diseases have evolved and changed over the years. The psychiatric wards have slowly but surely followed the progression of the science.

Instead of locking patients away and trying cure the illnesses with experimental treatments, the psychiatric wards you see today are very much like normal hospital wings. The difference between the two is the type of patients housed inside. There is more emotional pain inside the walls of a psychiatric ward than the physical pain of a normal hospital.

There are numerous things on the internet, videos and pictures, from patients who have had bad experiences in a mental health hospital and very few that depict a more common experience. One of safety and compassion. It takes a special kind of person to work with the mentally ill. With the stigma of mental illness, it is easy for most people to brush off the needs of these people, the pain and damage done to them.

Patients are given a strict set of rules and guidelines, in which they must follow. All patients are usually up early for breakfast, they have a group session or three in the afternoon and sessions one on one with their psychiatrist. The wards are usually split between adults and children, high-functioning and lower-functioning. Common treatments of the mentally ill nowadays are drug therapies and counseling, structure and routine.

Patients have a schedule set before them, are not usually allowed to wear or be in possession of anything that might cause harm to themselves or others. The only real time a patient is restrained is if they get to hard to handle during an episode. If they are harmful to themselves or someone else. Staff within the wards are trained to protect themselves and others from psychiatric episodes and are trained to handle the specific needs of these patients.

Depending on the mental illness afflicting a patient, their treatment is tailored to the individual. While one person might be doing arts and crafts in one room, another might be journaling in another. Doctors and nurses are to treat patients with the utmost care and respect, gone are the days of beatings and chains. Instead the staff is there to teach patients activities of daily life and helping to insure the patients can live with their illness, as there are no cures for these types of diseases

The staff in a mental health institution are required to check on the patients at least every 15 minutes, sometimes shorter intervals to make sure that there is nothing that the patient needs or that they are not in any danger or harm. Most facilities are locked and sometimes the windows may be fenced, but usually, its more common to see wards with open floor plans, wide nurses' stations, and day rooms with tvs and games for downtime.

Most of the people who are afflicted by the diseases of the mind are no scarier than any other person on the planet. While there are a few who have more sinister and malicious problems inside their brains, most of them can be helped to live a healthy and normal life. This is the same for the stigma of psychiatric hospitals. Most people think of them as scary and dangerous, when in reality, they were built, at least in our modern times, to provide aid and safety for their very special patients.