David T List

Many of them didn't. Your great-great-grandmother was probably drinking opium for her nerves, sold at the corner shop as cheap as a pint of beer. It was called laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol that doctors handed out for anxiety, sleeplessness, and "women's troubles." Mothers fed it to crying babies. The babies often stopped crying because they stopped breathing. The men drank. By 1830 the average American was putting away almost two bottles of liquor a week. Whiskey cost less than coffee or milk. People started their day with a shot and ended it with another. Toddlers drank from their parents' rum mugs. ADHD has a long paper trail. A Scottish doctor described kids who couldn't focus in 1798. By 1846 there was a popular German children's book about a boy called Fidgety Philipp who couldn't sit still. In 1902, a London children's doctor named George Still wrote a famous paper on the same kids and called it a "defect of moral control." Same kid, three different centuries. Depression and anxiety had old names too. Melancholia, hysteria, the vapors. Treatments included bloodletting, ice baths, and chaining people to a wall. By 1937, American mental hospitals held 451,672 patients and took up more than half of every hospital bed in the country. Inside the walls, about 1 in 10 patients died each year. Then came the lobotomy. Between 1949 and 1952, around 50,000 Americans were strapped to a chair while a doctor hammered an ice pick through the thin bone above their eye and wiggled it around inside their brain. It took about ten minutes. Sixty percent of the patients were women. About 1 in 20 died from the procedure. Many of the ones who lived came out with no personality left. The man who invented the procedure won a Nobel Prize. Britain's male suicide rate hit 30.3 per 100,000 in 1905. The lowest rates ever recorded in British history are happening right now. Plenty of our ancestors didn't make it. They drank themselves dead. They overdosed on shop-bought opium. They got locked in asylums and never came out. They had picks driven through their eye sockets. They killed themselves in numbers we don't see today. The conditions were always there. The treatments just used to be worse than the disease.