What it is
• Mostly know as mental retardation neurodevelopmental disorder that causes impaired intellectual and adaptive functioning determined by an IQ score under 70 and also includes delay in basic day-to-day living skills.
• It is usually caused by an abnormal gene inherited from either parent, error in gene coding, or other reasons.
Treatment before mental institutes
• Most mentally handicapped people were treated as outsiders, a burden to society. At the time most people thought that they were just really stupid.
• In most cases their families were shunned and treated as outsiders as well.
How they were treated
• In the 1930s mentally retarded people were treated very badly and considered a disgrace to society.
• Many were locked up in mental hospitals also known as asylums or insane asylums. They would take them and turn them into prisoners doing experiments and other things on them.
Treatments used
• A favorite treatment called electroshock was used to try to zap the disability out of them. They used a headband with conductors on both sides and shocked them repeatedly with upwards of 50 volts of electricity. • Another more gentle approach was hydrotherapy which was exposing patients to baths or showers of warm water for an extended period of time often had a calming effect on them. For this reason, mental hospitals used hydrotherapy as a tool for treating mental illness.
• The introduction of thorazine, the first psychotropic drug, was a huge discovery in treatment therapy, making it possible to calm bad behavior, anxiety, agitation, and confusion without using physical restraints. • A more disturbing one is a procedure called lobotomy which is a procedure which the brain's frontal lobe nerves are severed by inserting tools through the eye socket. This process
