Category: Remembering

Canada’s The Daily Gleaner has a brief but revealing insight into the understanding of juvenile crime and delinquent behaviour in the 1920s.

Obviously the cultural standards of the day were different, so some behaviours considered ‘delinquent’ then were not be considered so now, and vice versa.

However, it is also clear from the piece that theories of how delinquency came about were influenced by very different sets of assumptions.

Prior to the emergence and expansion of psychiatry, moral and eugenic discourses dominated the understanding of juveniles and their treatment. However, Toronto Mayor Howland and other 19th-century reformers believed “allowing youth to go to the devil was a sheer waste.”

They believed there was no “such thing as a youth being really criminal at heart,” and that all deviant actions were just “surface depravity.”

Children were considered to be the product of their surroundings, and if a delinquent grew up in idleness and crime, that is what any child would be in a similar situation.

Previously, the dominant explanation for juvenile deviance was a ‘defective mind’ due to an inherited degenerate constitution. Famous at the time were life histories of degenerate families, with their poverty, prostitution, alcoholism and incest.

The brief article also mentions case reports of the time with a short excerpt which seems nothing short of jaw-dropping from a modern perspective:

Amanda, for example, had become “impudent of late” with a tendency to become “foxy and cunning.” Physical examination of her hymen showed she “had been immoral,” so she was found guilty of vagrancy and sent to the home for girls.

When Amanda was asked by a social worker about her life goals, she said she wanted to be an actress, and the psychiatrist was appalled. He suggested that a better occupation would be milliner, with release conditional on her acceptance.

Link to psychology and delinquency in the 1920s (via @jonmsutton).

The Insight Therapy blog has a fantastic dash through the psychological history of masturbation – looking at how self-pleasuring has been linked to everything from madness to blindness and has even inspired a type of biscuit [no, not that type].

Through the 19th century, the assault on “self-abuse” continued: Reverend Sylvester Graham invented the Graham crackers to curb sexual impulses. In the 1830s, Benjamin Rush, renowned physician and signer of the declaration of Independence, argued that masturbation caused tuberculosis, memory loss, and epilepsy. JH Kellogg, turn of the century medical writer and creator of breakfast cereal, believed signs of masturbation included acne, weak back, and convulsions. Noted 19th century physician and early sex research pioneer Richard von Krafft Ebing linked masturbation to homosexuality and other types of what he considered deviance and illnesses.

The piece makes the interesting point that that the practice is more common in men than women and has been linked to range of positive health outcomes, perhaps suggesting that we should be aiming to include masturbation in the drive to close the gender gap.
 

Link to Insight Therapy on ‘The Masturbation Gap’.

In 1970 Psychology Today published a board game where players were divided into white and black, and had to make economic progress while competing with each other. Based on Monopoly, the idea was to demonstrate how the odds were stacked against black people in society by having different rules for each race in the game.

Whites started out with $1 million, blacks with $10,000 and each race had different opportunity decks. While whites could buy property in any part of the board, blacks were limited to certain areas until they had accumulated at least $100,000 and were outright banned from property in the ‘suburban zone’.

Needless to say, it turned out to be one of the most controversial board games of all time and even merited an article in Time magazine:

The game, produced by Psychology Today Games (an off shoot of the magazine) now on sale ($5.95) at major department stores, was developed at the University of California at Davis by Psychology Department Chairman Robert Sommer. It was conceived as a painless way for middle-class whites to experience—and understand—the frustrations of blacks. In Sommer’s version, however, the black player could not win; as a simulation of frustration, the game was too successful. Then David Popoff, a Psychology Today editor, redesigned the game, taking suggestions from militant black members of “US” in San Diego. The new rules give black players an opportunity to use—and even to beat—the System.

Although turning Monopoly into an attempt to draw people’s attention to social issues seems a little bit of a long shot, it’s worth noting that the original version of Monopoly itself, called ‘The Landlord’s Game‘, was designed to demonstrate how the current economic system led to inequality and bankruptcy.

Psychology Today’s board game division seems to have been short-lived but other titles included The Cities Game – that involved ‘urban tension, corruption and the undercurrents of city politics’; and Woman and Man where ‘Each woman must accumulate enough Status Quo points (100) to prove her equality to men. Each man must collect enough Status Quo points (100) to prove once and for all a woman’s place is beneath his’.

Fun for all the family.
 

Link to 1970 Time article on the ‘Blacks and Whites’ board game.
Link to game details and photos on BoardGameGeek.

I’ve just found a remarkable documentary on YouTube from a 1957 BBC series called ‘The Hurt Mind’. The programme attempts to de-stigmatise mental health for the public but also documents some of the most controversial treatments in the history of psychiatry.

The programme was an edition of a then pioneering five-part BBC series on mental health and this was the episode that specifically dealt with ‘physical treatments’ – that is, treatments which directly affect the brain, such as ECT, leucotomy, insulin coma therapy and abreaction.

This was before the days when pills were widely used in psychiatry – there were no antidepressants, antipsychotics or mood stabilisers and the only tranquilisers were heavyweight barbiturates, as benzodiazapines had yet to become available.

The psychiatrists on the programme are not named, but if I’m not mistaken, the main interviewee is William Sargant, who has a bit of sinister reputation for his enthusiasm for brain altering treatments, his interest in ‘brain washing’, and rumours he was funded by the CIA – as we’ve discussed previously.

Sargant literally wrote the book on physical treatments (titled An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry) and the programme presents them in the most biased possible light, in line with Sargant’s enthusiasms, by dismissing side-effects and selectively presenting single cases of recovered happy patients.

For those more familiar with the frontal lobotomy – popularised by American surgeon Walter Freeman, which involved hammering an ice pick under the orbits of the eyes – you’ll notice that the British version of the operation, the leucotomy, was substantially different in its approach and involved drilling small holes in the skull.

The programme also depicts abreaction, where a patient with a post-traumatic condition is given a drug – often barbiturate, or, in this case, ether – and encouraged to talk about the difficult event.

The procedure was based on the Freudian notion that emotional pain can be repressed and can ‘build up’ and cause difficulties in other areas – although a drug can be used to help break down the defences and releases the emotion in a healthy catharsis.

I suspect that the Billy Bunter-like psychiatrist who discusses and demonstrates abreaction is Eliot Slater, although I have no idea of the identity of the bespectacled doctor who discusses leucotomy (do leave a comment if you know).

The programme is classic post-war BBC: chaps with posh accents talk to cor blimey guv’ner commoners, and there are plenty uncomfortable pauses and a shaky set. As a piece of history, though, it is fascinating.

It also turns out that BBC and the Maudsley Hospital attempted to see how effective the programme was in educating the public and published a brief article in the British Medical Journal which analysed the sorts of letters that got sent in by viewers.

Interestingly, William Sargant wrote to the publication saying that he was a medical adviser to the series and had “on rare occasions appeared anonymously on such programmes” and defended how even-handed it was.

Regardless of your interest in the characters, however, the video is a rare insight into how these treatments were actually carried out.
 

Parts one, two, three and four of ‘The Hurt Mind’ on physical treatments.
Link to details of the series from the British Film Institute.
Link to good Wikipedia page on William Sargant.

The Cold War espionage styles of the US and Soviet spy agencies are compared in a fantastic article for the history of science journal Isis that notes that while the Americans tended to invest in technology, the Russians were more focused on ‘human intelligence’.

The article, by historian Kristie Macrakis, explores the technophilia of the CIA in contrast to the KGB’s emphasis on getting spies on the ground and how these contrasting styles played out in many (now infamous) incidents.

Soviet and East Bloc spies were better at their craft—recruiting and planting agents at key institutions, acquiring secret information, and especially developing the fine art of double agents. In fact, the East Bloc’s great success in using double agents turned into the CIA’s most appalling blunder. At the end of the Cold War, the CIA discovered that all of its East German and Cuban agents were, in fact, double agents working at the behest of East German or Cuban foreign intelligence.

As former CIA chief historian Benjamin B. Fischer writes, this rendered “the CIA deaf, dumb and blind” in East Germany. Further, “the East Germans, as well as the Soviets, ran circles around SE [the CIA’s Soviet‐Eastern European Division], neutralizing its operations and tying it up in knots with double agents who fed it disinformation.” The double agent fiasco occurred, in part, because of U.S. intelligence’s dependence on technological espionage and its lack of skill in human intelligence. In a sense, the East Bloc won the spy wars but lost the Cold War.

Link to full text of article.
Link to DOI entry.

The graph below records levels of sadness, anxiety and anger, in words taken from US pager messages, sent as the day of September 11th 2001 unfolded. The analysis is reported in a study just published in Psychological Science. Click for a larger version of the graph.
 

Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to DOI entry for study.

I have found what is reportedly the first description of a hallucinogenic ‘magic mushroom’ trip in the Western medical literature. It is from a 1926 paper on different types of mushroom poisoning that was published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and was written by William. W. Ford.

He lists various types of poisoning, including stomach upsets, cramps, vomiting and convulsions, but the final category is where he tackles the effects of what are now known as ‘magic mushrooms’ that contain the naturally occurring hallucinogenic drug psilocybin.

5. Mycetismus cerebralis. Here the patients show peculiar cerebral symptoms four or five hours after the fungi are eaten. They are greatly exhilarated, laugh immoderately on slight occasion, develop a staggering gait and show peculiar disturbances of vision. The symptoms are transient, the patients being restored to health in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, except for a peculiar sensation which they describe as a feeling “as if they were walking on air.” This subjective sensation may last several days.

The plants responsible for this peculiar poisoning are Panaeolus papilionaceus and Panaeolus campanulatus. They are of interest to us chiefly in that they grow on lawns together with the edible mushroom, Agaricus campestris, and also rarely in beds for the artificial propagation of this species.

Although leaders of the psychedelic movement have created back histories about Western use of hallucinogenic mushrooms – suggesting they were used for spiritual purposes by druids, the Ancient Greeks, and folk healers to the present day – historian Andy Letcher has noted that the effects of these fungi have, as far as we know, always been treated as accidental poisoning.

For example, he notes in his book on the cultural history of the ‘magic mushroom’ that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries medical records describe how consumption of what we would now recognise as ‘magic mushrooms’ were treated with emetics, cathartics, the stomach pump, and occasionally leeches, as would any other poison.

The medical article by William. W. Ford, published 30 years before the active ingredient of magic mushroom would be isolated, was the first time that the hallucinogenic effects had been identified as a distinct effect.

We know now that the toxicity of psilocybin is very low and the main dangers are being inebriated (off your face) or accidentally picking and eating genuinely poisonous mushrooms.

I learnt about this early medical report from an academic article by Andy Letcher where he analysis how ‘magic mushrooms’ have been discussed in popular culture and science.
 

Link to online version of paywalled 1926 paper.
Link to NYT review of Shrooms: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom.

I’ve just discovered an astounding article from the journal Medical History that left me, dare I say, open mouthed. It’s about how, in the early 1900s, thumb-sucking in children was considered a neurological disorder that was thought serious enough to justify paediatrics as a separate medical speciality.

It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time these were weighty concerns and thumb-sucking merited a place in medical textbooks where it was thought to be responsible for dental damage – a genuine risk to developing teeth in some cases – but less realistically, it was also cited as a cause of facial deformity and, oddly, masturbation.

Fuelled by the popularity of Freudian concepts, thumb-sucking was seen as infantile form of ‘self-pleasuring’ that had lots of knock-on effects for both child and adult development.

It’s probably worth explaining that, in those less enlightened times, whacking off was not only considered dirty, but a leading cause of insanity and hysteria. So the charge that one activity could trigger self-pleasuring was a much more serious affair.

These are genuine quotes from the medical textbooks of the time:

Many are absolutely incurable and the victim may be compelled to carry the marks of this practice and their accompanying discomforts through a long life.

So hideous is the deformity caused by this habit, that it seems incredible that it should be necessary even to call attention to it, much less to urge that action be taken to put a stop to the evil.

Probably the most pernicious result of sucking is its tendency to develop the habit of masturbation.

No consideration of the nervous and mental derangements of infancy would be complete which omitted the consideration of the curious group of minor psychoses which, for want of a more distinctive name, are usually referred to as “bad habits”.

Link to Medical History article on thumb sucking and paediatrics.