Mental Health Timeline (Mia)

Hippocrates thought that the mentally ill were actually ill in the mind. He focused on changing patients’ occupations or environments and gave them medicines in order to become better, unlike those throughout time who lined mental illness with religious punishments.

Dorothea Dix lobbied for better living conditions for the mentally ill after seeing how patients were living in horrible conditions in jails and other facilities.

Congress established the first Government Hospital for the Insane in DC, today is known as St. Elizabeth's Hospital

The hospital is officially open

Mental Health America (MHA) was founded by Clifford Beers in order to improve the lives and states of the mentally ill in the United States through research and lobbying

Dr. Walter Freeman and colleagues performed the first lobotomy; by the 1950’s 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the US.

Italian neurologist Ugo Cerletti introduced/used electroshock therapy for patients her suffered with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act in order to start/accelerate research in neuropsychiatric problem.

Thorazine - a drug used to treat certain mental/mood disorders, and used for many other problems - was the first antipsychotic drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration; quickly became popular in asylums.

more than 560,000 people are enrolled in mental institutions.