Season 2 · Episode 534
Before the Pill: The Brutal History of Psychiatry
Before modern meds, doctors used ice picks and malaria to treat the mind. Herman and Corn explore the desperate, dark history of early psychiatry.
My Weird Prompts · Daniel Rosehill
February 7, 202626m 19s
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Show Notes
What did we do before Prozac? In this episode, Herman and Corn dive into the "shame" of psychiatry, exploring a time when the field lacked objective tools and relied on radical, often terrifying experiments. From the "Moral Treatment" of rural asylums to the Nobel Prize-winning use of malaria and the infamous ice-pick lobotomy, we uncover the desperate measures taken by doctors to "reboot" the human brain. It’s a sobering look at how far we’ve come from the era of "Lobotomobiles" and "wet sheet packs" to the molecular breakthroughs of today.