Comments | little_details: Early Psychology

animus_nocendi in little_details

Early Psychology

Apr 15, 2010 21:45

Setting: Los Angeles, CA roughly between 1920 and 1950 ( Read more... )

1940-1949, ~psychology & psychiatry: institutions, 1920-1929, usa: california, 1930-1939, ~psychology & psychiatry: historical

Comments 13

nextian April 16 2010, 02:26:19 UTC

Hmmm... I can't direct you to LA hospitals in specific, but testimonials about shock therapy are pretty widely available and were certainly dead common in Los Angeles by the nineteen-sixties (where they were used on a female relative for being, you know, unladylike). Wiki suggests shock therapy/electroconvulsive therapy picked up in 1940, so that should be perfect for your purposes.

animus_nocendi April 16 2010, 03:55:57 UTC

Thanks for the input!

naamah_darling April 16 2010, 03:38:51 UTC

If you want stories of how bad it gets, I suggest adding "abuse" to your search strings to find descriptions of the "treatments" visited upon institutionalized mentally ill people even now. It wasn't better then. Shock treatments, sterilization to cover up the routine rape, nasty drugs, horrible living conditions.

I also suggest not doing this if you aren't prepared to spend a lot of time afterward trying not to throw up.

animus_nocendi April 16 2010, 03:57:09 UTC

Very interesting. I'll look into this with some preparedness.

bratri_v_zbrani April 16 2010, 03:49:43 UTC

Shock therapies came before 1940's. I would say that they were probably going down as you approach the 1950's, which is when chlorpromazine came out and started replacing a lot of the shock therapies intended for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. After which came various other drugs like Meprobamate, Miltown, Valium ( ... )

animus_nocendi April 16 2010, 03:57:31 UTC

Very helpful! You've given me a great place to start. Thanks.

rosehiptea April 16 2010, 04:54:20 UTC

The big mental hospital near here (L.A.) when I was a kid in the 70s was Camarillo State Hospital. I just looked it up and apparently it was established in 1932. (The big insult when I was a kid was "They're going to send you to Camarillo.")

I realize you don't want to write about a real hospital, but googling Camarillo State Hospital got me plenty of results and some of it could be a jumping-off point for you.

animus_nocendi April 16 2010, 07:24:51 UTC

Excellent, thanks!

pentane April 16 2010, 13:33:18 UTC

The other thing you may want to look into is eugenics which sort of ties into what you are researching and is pretty much off everyone's radar since World War 2 (in the sense that no one really knows it was a popular thing even here in the United States).

animus_nocendi April 17 2010, 06:07:17 UTC

Interesting. I'll definitely read up on it. Thanks.