As a long term student of history of medicine , I have always been distressed learning about the tribulations the mentally ill have had to endure historically. They still continue to do so.
There have been visionaries like Philippe Pinel in France and John Connolly in England who have taken up cudgels on behalf of the mentally ill but the impact they have had can be assessed by the fact that straight jackets and padded cells were common place in mental hospitals more than a 100 years after their innovative measures.And all this was happening when it had been accepted that these unfortunate individuals were suffering from an infirmity that not just needed medical attention but societal understanding. The saddest part is that although many of the European mental hospitals have abandoned forcible involuntary restraint, there are several countries where these outdated modalities are still…
