Op-Ed: There’s an app for that – mental health treatment has come a long way since the days of lobotomies

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There were times when physicians believed that removing certain body parts, or injecting patients with malaria-infected blood, were cures for mental illnesses. And it wasn’t that long ago that lobotomies were standard procedures. Today, there are even apps available – we’ve come a long way.

, the American Psychiatric Association identified no fewer than eight distinct forms of psychotherapy that can effectively alleviate mood disturbances, including cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapies, interpersonal psychotherapy and psychodynamic therapies.

In the 1940s some doctors believed that the only way to treat severe mental illness was by surgically damaging the frontal lobes of the brain, in a procedure that came to be known as a lobotomy. It isthat by 1972, approximately 50,000 lobotomies had been performed on mentally ill adults and children in asylums in the USA, often against their will.

Crucially, the early history of psychiatry has left contemporary mental healthcare professionals with a responsibility to challenge misconceptions about mental illness, and work consistently to advocate person-centred evidence-based treatments.Technological advances provide exciting novel opportunities for improving access to mental healthcare. Computer applications and web-based therapies to treat mental illness are rapidly being developed and tested.

For reasons that are not well understood, people respond differently to different modes of psychological and pharmaceutical treatments. This can make it frustrating for anyone looking for immediate relief from their symptoms, and discouraging to those of us who need to try more than one treatment before we find one that works for us.

 

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