Where depression treatment had previously been focused only on psychotherapy, drug therapies now started to be developed and added to the mix. In addition, new schools of thought, such as cognitive behavioral and family systems theory emerged as alternatives to psychodynamic theory in depression treatment.
Full Answer
How did therapy for depression change over the years?
In the mid-twentieth century, there was also more work done in the discovery of pharmaceutical drugs that could help with mental states. However, through the 1970s, the main form of therapy for depression continued to be based on Freudian psychoanalysis, including talk therapy.
Can therapy help with depression?
If you're struggling with depression, it's important for you to know that there are multiple forms of therapy available to help you overcome it. Unlike what was believed in ancient history, depression is a treatable health condition.
How did people in the 16th century treat depression?
During this time, some like Robert Burton, in 1621 started to talk about natural treatments such as exercise and dieting. They also started to use forms of treatment, such as music therapy, travel, and herbs. During the Enlightenment era, the beliefs started to change again about depression.
What are the different methods of treating depression?
Common methods of treating depression include antidepressant drugs and talk therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is one common type of talk therapy, which was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck.
How has depression been treated in the past?
The Common Era Exorcisms, drowning, and burning were popular treatments of the time. Many people were locked up in so-called "lunatic asylums." While some doctors continued to seek physical causes for depression and other mental illnesses, they were in the minority.
How has the treatment of mental illness changed over time?
Mental health has been transformed over the last seventy years. There have been so many changes: the closure of the old asylums; moving care into the community; the increasing the use of talking therapies. They have all had a hugely positive impact on patients and mental health care.
What is new in the treatment of major depression?
Esketamine can trigger new connections in your brain too. You may start to see improvements in your depression within hours or days of using it, Sanacora says. Esketamine offers lifesaving hope for people with suicidal thoughts and relief for people with treatment-resistant depression.
How was depression treated in the 19th century?
Various methods and drugs were recommended and used for the therapy of depression in the 19th century, such as baths and massage, ferrous iodide, arsenic, ergot, strophantin, and cinchona. Actual antidepressants have been known only for approximately 30 years.
How was depression treated in the 1950s?
The use of certain treatments for mental illness changed with every medical advance. Although hydrotherapy, metrazol convulsion, and insulin shock therapy were popular in the 1930s, these methods gave way to psychotherapy in the 1940s. By the 1950s, doctors favored artificial fever therapy and electroshock therapy.
How were mental health patients treated in the past?
Isolation and Asylums Overcrowding and poor sanitation were serious issues in asylums, which led to movements to improve care quality and awareness. At the time, medical practitioners often treated mental illness with physical methods. This approach led to the use of brutal tactics like ice water baths and restraint.
What is the latest research on depression?
In the largest-ever study of depression and inflammation, published in 2021 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, scientists confirmed the link between the two. They found people with depression had more inflammation than those without the mental health disorder.
Is ECT still used to treat depression?
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a medical treatment most commonly used in patients with severe major depression or bipolar disorder that has not responded to other treatments. ECT involves a brief electrical stimulation of the brain while the patient is under anesthesia.
Are scientists working on a cure for depression?
Stanford researchers devise treatment that relieved depression in 90% of participants in small study. Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression.
How was mental health treated in the 1900s?
The use of social isolation through psychiatric hospitals and “insane asylums,” as they were known in the early 1900s, were used as punishment for people with mental illnesses.
How was mental health treated in the 1970s?
In the treatment of mental disorders, the 1970s was a decade of increasing refinement and specificity of existing treatments. There was increasing focus on the negative effects of various treatments, such as deinstitutionalization, and a stronger scientific basis for some treatments emerged.
How were mental patients treated in the 1800s?
In early 19th century America, care for the mentally ill was almost non-existent: the afflicted were usually relegated to prisons, almshouses, or inadequate supervision by families. Treatment, if provided, paralleled other medical treatments of the time, including bloodletting and purgatives.
What were the treatments for depression in the 1930s?
Exorcisms, drowning, and burning were popular treatments of the time. Many people were locked up in so-called "lunatic asylums.". While some doctors continued to seek physical causes for depression and other mental illnesses, they were in the minority.
Who dealt with depression?
As such, it was dealt with by priests rather than physicians. 1 . The idea of depression being caused by demons and evil spirits has existed in many cultures, including those of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Chinese, and Egyptians.
What is depression caused by?
Hippocrates, a Greek physician, suggested that depression (initially called "melancholia") was caused by four imbalanced body fluids called humours: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. 2 Specifically, he thought that melancholia was caused by too much black bile in the spleen.
What did the behaviorist movement believe?
The behaviorist movement in psychology contributed to the idea that behaviors are learned through experience. The behaviorists rejected the idea that depression was caused by unconscious forces and instead suggested that it was a learned behavior.
What was depression in the 18th century?
During the 18th and 19th centuries, also called the Age of Enlightenment, depression came to be viewed as a weakness in temperament that was inherited and could not be changed. The result of these beliefs was that people with this condition should be shunned or locked up.
What did Robert Burton recommend for depression?
In this book, he made recommendations like diet, exercise, travel, purgatives (to clear toxins from the body), bloodletting, herbs, and music therapy in the treatment ...
What caused depression in the Romans?
In the last years before the common era, in spite of some steps toward believing in more physical and mental causes of depression, it was still a very common belief among even educated Romans that depression and other mental illnesses were caused by demons and by the anger of the gods.
What causes depression in the brain?
Perhaps some forms of depression occur when a stimulus — genetics, environment or stress — causes the death of nerve cells in the hippocampus. In the nondepressed brain, circuits of nerve cells in the hippocampus may send signals to the subcallosal cingulate to regulate mood.
Why is serotonin weak?
In depressed brains, the serotonin signal had somehow been “weakened” because of a chemical imbalance in neurotransmitters. Prozac and Paxil were thought to increase serotonin levels, thereby strengthening the signals between nerve cells — as if a megaphone had been inserted in the middle.
Which cingulate is particularly rich in nerve cells that are sensitive to serotonin?
The subcallosal cingulate is particularly rich in nerve cells that are sensitive to serotonin. Researchers found that if they blocked the serotonin signal in the brains of depressed rats, the pacemaker no longer worked. A remarkable and novel theory for depression emerges from these studies.
How many prescriptions were issued for Prozac in 1988?
In 1988, a year after the Food and Drug Administration approved Prozac, 2,469,000 prescriptions for it were dispensed in America. By 2002, that number had risen to 33,320,000. By 2008, antidepressants were the third-most-common prescription drug taken in America.
What was Elizabeth Wurtzel's experience with Prozac?
In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.”.
What is the chemical in Prozac?
Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as Prozac. In her 1994 book “Prozac Nation,” Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote of a nearly transcendental experience on the drug. Before she began treatment with antidepressants, she was living in “a computer program of total negativity . . . an absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” She floated from one “suicidal reverie” to the next. Yet, just a few weeks after starting Prozac, her life was transformed. “One morning I woke up and really did want to live. . . . It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. Was it the Prozac? No doubt.”
Why does the placebo effect work?
In part, the placebo effect works because the psyche acutely modifies the perception of illness or wellness.
What is the history of depression?
Throughout human history, and long before our current definition for major depression or major depression disorder treatment, the concept of depression has been repeatedly molded and reconceived. As society changes, so does its view of depression, with philosophers, social theorists, artists, ...
Who was the first to describe depression as a mental illness?
It was 19th Century German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin who began referring to various forms of melancholia as “depressive states,” due to the low mood that defines it. Kraepelin also took a dual approach to mental illness, separating depression into two categories: manic depression and dementia praecox.
How do antidepressants affect the brain?
Antidepressants affect the brain’s secretion of neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that relay information between nerve cells. Over the years, several generations of antidepressants have been approved and made publicly available, with each influencing the neural pathways involved in depression in a different way.
Why did existentialists gain popularity after WWII?
Existentialism: Existentialism gained popularity following WWII, due to its focus on the individual’s search for meaning in a world that often seems incomprehensible. Among the leading existential theorists was psychologist Rollo May, who described depression as “the inability to construct a future.”.
What is the Hamilton scale for depression?
As a result, more sophisticated tools were developed for assessing depression, chiefly the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HDRS) from 1960, and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) from 1961. Both are considered gold standards and are still used today.
What did Freud think of depression?
Freud posited that depression interferes with the normal mourning process, causing the individual to feel a general sadness when coming in contact with the world at large, while experiencing the anguish and hopelessness assailing them as inescapable.
When was Deep TMS first used?
Deep TMS was first introduced in 1985 , and gain FDA clearance in 2014, as a form of noninvasive brain stimulation, and like standard TMS, utilizes magnetic fields to safely and effectively regulate brain structures associated with depression, as well as other mental health conditions.
Trephination
Trephination dates back to the earliest days in the history of mental illness treatments. It is the process of removing a small part of the skull using an auger, bore, or saw. This practice began around 7,000 years ago, likely to relieve headaches, mental illness, and even the belief of demonic possession.
Bloodletting and Purging
Though this treatment gained prominence in the Western world beginning in the 1600s, it has roots in ancient Greek medicine. Claudius Galen believed that disease and illness stemmed from imbalanced humors in the body. English physician Thomas Willis used Galen’s writings as a basis for this approach to treating mentally ill patients.
Isolation and Asylums
Isolation was the preferred treatment for mental illness beginning in medieval times, which may explain why mental asylums became widespread by the 17th century.
Insulin Coma Therapy
This treatment was introduced in 1927 and continued until the 1960s. In insulin coma therapy, physicians deliberately put the patient into a low blood sugar coma because they believed large fluctuations in insulin levels could alter how the brain functioned. Insulin comas could last one to four hours.
Metrazol Therapy
In metrazol therapy, physicians introduced seizures using a stimulant medication. Seizures began roughly a minute after the patient received the injection and could result in fractured bones, torn muscles, and other adverse effects. The therapy was usually administered several times a week. Metrazol was withdrawn from use by the FDA in 1982.
Lobotomy
This now-obsolete treatment won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1949. It was designed to disrupt the circuits of the brain but came with serious risks. Popular during the 1940s and 1950s, lobotomies were always controversial and prescribed in psychiatric cases deemed severe.
Earliest Accounts of Depression
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
The Common Era
The Age of Enlightenment
The 19th and 20th Century
The 19th and 20th Century Treatments
- During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, treatments for severe depression generally weren't enough to help patients. Desperate for relief, many people turned to lobotomies, which are surgeries to destroy the brain's prefrontal lobe. Though reputed to have a "calming" effect, lobotomies often caused personality changes, a loss of decision-maki...
Our Understanding of Depression Today