ABSTRACT
The history of the treatment of mental illness is a strange one, in that it seems to learn nothing from either its failures or its successes. In ancient Greece, mental illness in women was attributed to their wandering wombs. Treatment in the eighteenth century was limited to various forms of cruelty that is restraints, chains, blood-letting, what educator's could call water boarding. Treatment in France and England was of the physical kind, causing unimaginable pain to patients and curing no one. The patients included King George III, who, it was later decided, suffered from porphyria, a rare genetic disease which can lead to high levels of toxic substances that cause temporary delirium. Robert Whitaker proves that patients were long kept in the dark about the dangerous side effects, and were even encouraged to participate in experiments that exaggerated their delusions.
