My emphasis was the idea of taking bits off people just so they conform to our way of life. To my mind a very unscientific method of controlling people and no better that witchcraft. The fact is not that they don't understand why electric shock treatment works on some and not other. But the fact they don't understand it at all. Barbaric if you ask me.
But you can't apply barbarism JUST to mental health and turn a blind eye to what went on in other areas of medicine. MANY found themselves in mental institutions because their families didn't know what else to do with them. Women who had babies out of wedlock were said to be suffering from Nymphomania. These poor girls may have been treated -entirely, IMO, unnecessarily- with ECT, but balance that against, for example, the amount of, perhaps healthy limbs which were amputated in the most appalling conditions, leaving the patient to either die from infection OR being subject to life as a pauper because they were unable to work.
Medicine, mental AND physical, HAS come a long way since those days, but it often falls down in its application, ie when departments don't share information it's the patient who suffers, when the correct hygiene procedures aren't adhered to it's the patient who suffers, when there is poor communication between patient and staff it's the patient who suffers.
