Psychiatry. It means "mind doctor." Coined in the 1800's. It had different names before. It is a means of subjugating people. Before the 1900's basically, one was identified as mad, strange, or different, or "difficult," -----meaning not just going along with whatever the rich pushed on you. Then, unless you had lots of money to be safe from this, they just locked you up in castles and such, like the one pictured, in Built in 1784, Vienna's Narrenturm, German for "lunatics' tower," one of the oldest buildings which are specifically designed as a "madhouse." You were often shackled with chains. This was 'treatment." It was to get you out of the sight of rich or "respectable" people and few were concerned with you. When leprosy died out, "crazy people" became the new lepers, untouchables. Most likely you would spend the rest of your wretched life there.
Of course, this led to abuses.........many rich men had their wives locked up just for not being their slave properly. Often poets and thinkers, philosophers etc who were spreading ideas not approved by the "consensus society (the rich/rulers)" were declared insane, locked away, and their life works, books, everything burned. This happened even as late as the 1950's--witness the persecution and imprisonment of Dr. Wilhelm Reich. In the 1940's such innovative "treatments" like dousing the prisoners ("patients") with fire hoses or wrapping them in cold wet blankets were common. Then along came the idea of giving non-diabetics a large shot of insulin to cause them to have an epileptic convulsion--another miracle treatment for the psychiatrists! Around the same time forced sterilization (castration) and ice-pick lobotomies became popular for the "insane." Nazi Germany in the 30's and 40's used many of these ideas to get rid of any "useless eaters" as they were called. In fact, most of Hitler's "Final Solution" was designed by psychiatrists. Only a very few were named or prosecuted at Nuremburg.
Finally in the late 1950's a chemical castration/lobotomy drug, chlorpromazine, was synthesized. So, it made the tormentors/custodians SEEM a little more HUMANE. Soon many more of these phenothiazines were produced and almost all "psych patients" were put on these. Needless to say, psychiatry has a huge history of doing things against the will of the hostage. It has nearly become the rule, rather than the exception. The drugs as you may know, have terrible acute side effects, and cause permanent brain damage. They still do.
