It appears that psychiatry has come full-circle. Psychopharmythology is now the new Bedlam: chemical restraints in place of the head-box, the therapeutic coffin, insulin shock and ECST, hypothermic baths and solitary confinement, a throw back to the Skinnerian age of behavioural modification and operant conditioning.This painting shows the Bethleham Royal Hospital, London. The first asylum for the insane in England. The word bedlam is derived from the name of the hospital and became a generic term for all asylums and colloquially to mean random disorder or chaos.
Bedlam was infamous for its ill treatment of the inmates, and this picture shows visitors, a man being shackled by the attendants (early nurses?) and the overcrowding and squalor of the hospital during the mid 1700s
