8 curiosities about psychiatry that may surprise you.

Curiosities about psychiatry that help you understand this medical specialty discipline.

Despite being relatively young, psychiatry is something well present in today's society, especially in the form of pharmacological treatments to treat mental disorders. In fact, it is so young that to this day there are still those who question it as a science.

Those who criticize it consider that it does not have a well-defined object of study, arguing that if psychiatry studies the brain, then it should be a branch of neurology; and if what it studies is the mind, then it is a specialty of psychology.

Leaving aside the debate surrounding psychiatry, we can comment on the following some curiosities about psychiatryThe historical background as well as anecdotes and facts of its more modern side.

8 curiosities of Psychiatry (explained).

Psychiatry is a specialty of medicine, but it has earned its independence. This discipline is responsible for the prevention, evaluation, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of people with mental disorders, aiming to improve their state of health and ensure that patients can enjoy a better quality of life. Given its object of study and intervention, it is impossible not to relate it to neurology, psychology, biology and medicine in general.

There are many myths, anecdotes and facts that revolve around psychiatry, various curiosities that we will discover below.

1. Devilish possessions and dysregulation of bodily fluids

Many of the curiosities of psychiatry have to do with its history and the way disorders have been viewed over time. For a long time, mental disorders were attributed a supernatural origin, being seen as the consequence of the action of an evil force.They were seen as the consequence of the action of an evil force. This belief was especially painful both for those suffering from the disorder and for their relatives, who believed that the evil had trapped them and they had no chance to escape from it.

This was not the view of the classical Greeks, who had a more global idea of health. Ancient Greeks saw the body and mind as a unit, something inseparable, and therefore interpreted any abnormality as an imbalance in the organism, whether physical or mental.

So thought Galen, who defended that mental disorders were the result of fluid dysregulation, considering that mania was caused by alterations in yellow bile and that melancholy, or modern depression, was due to black bile.

During the Middle Ages, mental disorders were thought to be the result of diabolical possessions.. In contrast, on the other side of the pond, in pre-Columbian America, a different perspective was taken on psychic alterations, something that survives to this day in several native cultures of the continent where abnormal behavior is seen as a kind of sign of magical divinity.

2. The ship of the mad

It is not known whether it is myth or reality, but there is a legend that says that, before modern psychiatry and long before people with mental disorders were seen in the West for what they are, people, society had a particular way of "solving" the psychological problems of its citizens.

People with mental disorders, far from being well treated or committed somewhere to recover, were put on ships that have been called "madmen's ships". This practice consisted of forcibly embarking people with mental disorders on board, making them set sail and never allowing them to set foot on land again..

Those who did not board the grim ship did not fare much better. Many of them were tied up and chained in stables or somewhere away from the rest of society, places where they received humiliation and mistreatment if they caused trouble. And to top it all off, when they died, they were not buried in ordinary cemeteries, when they died they were not buried in common cemeteries, since it was believed that their body was possessed and it was best to cremate them. and the best thing was to cremate them.

3. A chimpanzee and thousands of lobotomized brains

One of the most amazing anecdotes in the history of psychiatry involves a chimpanzee, brains and a Nobel Prize winner.

Lobotomy is one of the most controversial practices in psychiatry, It consists of removing areas of the brain in order to "cure" mental disorders..

Its inventor was the Portuguese António Egas Moniz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, who discovered this technique while practicing on a chimpanzee, just one. Mr. Moniz had nothing better one day than to take a chimpanzee and remove parts of its brain, to see what would happen.

Based on a single experiment and not even on human beings, a whole new technique would emerge that would be applied to hundreds of patients, changing their lives forever, often for the worse.changing their lives forever, in many cases for the worse.

4. Unknown biological cause

At the moment, there is no clinical medical test for mental disorders, i.e. there is no Blood test, nor is it possible to open someone's skull and find out which area of their brain is altered and, from this, establish a diagnosis of schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorder. Mental disorders are detected on the basis of behavior, speech, perception and symptoms reported by the patient, not on the basis of biomarkers..

In fact, the reason we call depression or schizophrenia "disorders" and not "diseases" is that there is no unequivocal biological cause for these disorders, unlike diseases such as cancer (spread of tumors), COVID-19 disease (eponymous virus) or tonsillitis (tonsillar inflammation) where an unknown but obvious biological cause is known or attributed to them.

5. Electroconvulsive therapy still exists.

When many people hear the word "psychiatry", the first thing they think of is electroconvulsive therapy, also known as electroshock.. It is a scary word, perceived as threatening because it plays with something as potentially dangerous as electric current. When we hear it, images come to mind of patients tied to chairs and with teethers in their mouths as they spasmodically convulse.

Well, this type of electroshock existed, but it is part of the past. However, electroconvulsive therapy still exists, electroconvulsive therapy still exists, and it is not at all how it is portrayed in Hollywood.There are no spasms, convulsions or tremors, only a person who receives a small electric current in a controlled manner, to strategically change the functioning of some part of his brain.

This type of therapy is used for cases of very severe depression, where the patient is not even able to get out of bed or to clean himself on his own. It is also used in cases of refractory schizophrenia, when pharmacological treatment has not worked. Whatever the disorder for which it is used, the therapy is applied in a hospital and requires general anesthesia, which means that the patient does not notice anything.

It should be said that, although it is much milder and more controlled today than it was in the past, this does not mean that it is free of side effects. Its main risk is long-term memory loss, although this occurs in less than 1% of cases..

6. Transcranial magnetic stimulation

Although it has been approved since 2008 in the United States for the treatment of depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) remains the great unknown even within psychiatry.

Based on biologistic perspectives, the brain of a person with depression would have a lower proportion of certain neurotransmitters (e.g., serotonin), which imply less brain activation in certain areas, especially those responsible for mood.

With this in mind, the aim of TMS is to get these areas activated, to make them form more connections between them and thus reduce the symptomatology of the brain..

Neurons are electrochemical cells, which means that the use of drugs stimulates them and makes them grow chemically while transcranial magnetic stimulation does it electrically.

In this type of stimulation, magnets, similar to those used in an MRI, are used to produce electromagnetic currents to concentrate produce electromagnetic currents to concentrate the energy in the area of the brain that controls the limbic systemthe part of our brain in charge of our emotions.

In contrast, drugs, which enter our bloodstream and have the ability to produce effects throughout our entire body, TMS has the advantage of being applied only to the specific part of the brain responsible for depression. Thanks to this, this type of therapy is a good alternative for cases in which the use of medication can be worrisome, as would be the case of antidepressants in pregnant women.

Unlike the old electroconvulsive therapy, TMS does not require anesthesia, nor does it pose any risk to memoryThe magnetic currents applied in this therapy do not alter the hippocampus, the part of the brain believed to be responsible for the formation of new memories.

In addition, unlike other psychiatric therapies, TMS is not a lifelong treatment, although it is intensive. The patients to whom it is applied must attend about 5 days of therapy every week for a period of 4 to 6 weeks, with significant improvements after the third week.

7. Why do some people abandon their medication?

One of the questions that are heard more around the pharmacological treatments of psychiatry is why there are certain people who abandon their medication. Is it that they do not want to feel better? Do the medicines make them feel bad? Is it a symptom of their disorder?

Although there are many explanations for this, each one different for each type of patient, the truth is that we can summarize them in two everyday situations.

This may come as a shock to many, but not in all mental disorders the person feels "bad". In fact, may feel so "good" that he or she wishes to stay that way forever.. An example is bipolar disorder, whose name used in the past suggests what happens to these patients: manic depression; there are moments of highs, which is the manic phase, and other moments of lows, which are the depressive phase.

On the one hand, no one wants to manifest the negative symptoms of bipolar disorder such as depression, psychotic outbreaks, paranoia, hallucinations and irritability. On the other hand, the patient experiences the manic phase, a period when he feels he is going to eat the world. He feels energetic, little fatigued, climbing the emotional roller coaster hill so high that he thinks he can handle absolutely anything.

It is because of the effects of the manic phase, that emotional high that the patient experiences, the person may come to the skewed conclusion that those "positive" symptoms far outweigh the unwanted effects of the negative ones, and so they decide to abandon the medication. When they are in the manic phase they feel that they can do anything, that they will be able to be very productive and active people, and that they will know how to make the most of what they have. and that they will be able to take advantage of what they believe is an advantage of the disorder.

But they still need to take medication, since their symptoms are not positive whichever way you look at it. To begin with, in the manic phase they may engage in very harmful behaviors such as taking drugs, driving recklessly or losing control over themselves.

Added to this, the next phase, that of depression, can be so extremely profound and hopeless that the patient ends his or her life or, in the mildest cases, does absolutely nothing for a while, unable to get out of bed.

The other explanation for why some people give up medication has to do with side effects. has to do with the side effects. It is no secret that all medications have adverse effects, problems that may cease to manifest themselves the moment the patient abandons the drugs.

This causes some patients to decide to abandon medication for fear of experiencing side effects, even though the therapeutic effects, i.e. the benefits, outweigh the drawbacks.

8. Mindfulness and psychiatry

It is no secret that Mindfulness is especially valued in psychology, becoming very popular in the last decade.

Mindfulness is a good tool to help patients, especially people with anxiety disorders, to manage their daily lives. However, despite what one might think, this type of therapeutic approach has become increasingly popular in psychology in the last decade, this type of therapeutic approach has been gaining a foothold in psychiatry.It has become so important that there are even psychiatrists who are considering giving up drugs to treat it.

Mindfulness is based on self-awareness and meditation, techniques that are known to have served millions of people in Asia. Now, the Western world is introducing them into its clinical practice and approaches them in a scientific way, as evidenced by the many studies that have pointed out the benefits of the techniques on which mindfulness is based.