Anxiety treatment research

Due to my game being set in 1920 it is set before anxiety was recognized as a mental health condition (anxiety was recognized in 1980) meaning that the game is set a whole 60 years before anxiety was seen as a real condition.

The following page is some research I did on how they used to "treat" anxiety and other mental health issues before 1980.

According to History of Anxiety Disorders | Healthy Place "Anxiety Disorders were only recognized in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association. Before this recognition people experiencing one of these Disorders usually received a generic diagnosis of 'stress' or 'nerves'. " This is interesting as it shows that before 1980 people used to barely get help and were just basically told to move on with their lives.

This site also states that "It was often thought that Anxiety Disorders and panic attacks were a "women's problem." This is certainly untrue. Although men are more hesitant to present for treatment, both women and men are affected by these Disorders." This could be a good point t being up as this may be a Segway into some toxic masculinity that the other men in the game could apply to the player by calling him a women for acting in an stressed or nervous manor.

I also found out throughout this site that although anxiety was only recognized in the last 40 years it has existed throughout the whole of human history, with many great and famous individuals throughout history expressing that they had feelings of panic attacks and symptoms similar to that of the now recognized anxiety disorder.

Due to the under the under the radar history of anxiety many different treatments some quite scary and dangerous and more than often ineffective have been invented over time in hopes of "curing" the patient some of those include :

In the medieval and ancient times it was believed that different herbs and balms would help cure a person suffering from anxiety like symptoms.
Bathing in extremally cold rivers and body's of water
Hydrotherapy which saw the patient very dangerously put in a body of extremally more than often high temperatures.
Health spas
Blood letting which saw the use of leeches on ones body in order to suck the worries away????
"With the dawn of psychoanalysis and Freud, many people turned to the therapist's couch as a solution to their experience with an Anxiety Disorder. With the advent of pharmaceuticals, drugs were prescribed heavily for people presenting with an Anxiety Disorder (although it was not called an Anxiety Disorder at this time)"

I then looked at another site called A Brief History of Anxiety (calmclinic.com) which looked at the history of anxiety throughout the ages and gave some information about it.

for example "during the era of Greek rule that the term “hysteria” was coined, which would mean bad news for anxiety-prone women for centuries to come. The word “hysteria” actually has its root in the Greek cognate for the uterus, “hystera," most likely because it practitioners at the time believed it only to affect women." Meaning that they believe anxiety like behavior/symptoms only effected women due to a idea/theory that it was effected by the uterus.

I then looked forward on the page in order to find information about the early 20th century, which is when my games set, to find out other ways as to how anxiety like symptoms were treated at that time to find the following information about the early 20th century's approach to anxiety:

- " The Russians seem to have been the first to catch on to the psychological nature of this condition, and began sending psychiatrists off to war along with soldiers to treat them after a battle during Russia’s war with Japan in 1904"

meaning that people were aware that anxiety was a psychological condition but did not have the means to cure/treat it also the website also stated that in the early 20th century "Unfortunately, for many years it was also considered appropriate to sterilize anyone suffering from a mental illness in case their condition should be transferable to children"

And furthermore from 1930 onwards the mixture of different therapy's became more widely sued spreading from calm muscle relation techniques all the well to electroshock therapy.

I also looked at a popular TV show called "American Horror Story more specifically the episode of series 2 called "Asylum" which is a fictional show set in 1964 at an mental institution called, Briarcliff Manor, which follows the stories of the staff and inmates who occupy it.

The episodes showcases some different types of "treatment" that was used in insane asylums at the time including:

- electroshock therapy

- lobotomy (cutting part of the "infected" section of the brain and removing it in hopes of removing disorder)

- exorcisms ( the expulsion or attempted expulsion of a supposed evil spirit from a person or place.)

The story may be exaggerate for storytelling effect of the show however , this show gave me a visual representation of the horrors that were inflicted on people with mental health condition sin order to "treat" them during this era of time.

What I will be taking from this research

This research has helped me understand the ways mental health in general was viewed in the early 20th century and this research have given me the idea to have a possible bad ending to my game idea that sees the player be taken to a mental health asylum and try and escape from the people attempting to "Treat" him using some of these methods