I'm alive, I'm sleeping like a rock, and for some reason I wanted cherry juice so that seems to be helping. (??? Weirdo that I am.)

***

Infamous therapies over history:

1. The Attic. The madwoman in the attic is a motif in literature going waaaaaay back: the nutty female relative is locked in the attic. (See: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte for a grotesquely racist version of it, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper for a haunting look at it from within.)  People thought the best way to get rid of an inconvenient relative was... lock 'em up. 

2. The Asylum. Aaaaand when you could afford it, you didn't lock them up at home! You locked them up in an asylum! These were often named charming things like "Institute for the Blind, Epileptic and Feeble-Minded" or "Hospital for the Retarded and Insane". (Real names, btw.) 

3. Prison. Well, that's not really on purpose, but a lot of people with issues end up there because, well, y'know. They shut down the asylums, bad shit happens, and whammo. Someone with a serious issue ends up having even more. *sigh*

4. Electrical. Hook 'em up! Their brainwaves will get all fixed with this here electrical shock therapy! While this has some validity in neurosciencec,  for treatment of exxtreme mood disorders, particularly depression, most people just got a nasty dose of epilepsy out of it. 

5. Water. Oh, theyd id love to stick people in water at a temperature that induced hypothermia...

6. Purges. One infamous such purge involved 2 quarts of fresh yogurt... and it went in the back end, not down your throat. Other purges included salts of mercury, warm salt water, and what we'll politely call the starvation diet. 

7. Medication. Mostly, here's alcohol withg opium in it for most of human history, until the drug Thorazine hit. Then, as therapists tell me, "that's when the screaming stopped". Thorazine was overused and causes movement disorders. it's a great antipsychotic, but they used it on EVERYONE in the 1950s and early 1960s. That an dphenobarbital. Yep, a barbituate. Better living with chemistry! (DuPont slogan.)

8. Religion. Get God! That'll fix your schizophrenia, your Down's, your autism (not yet named), your tendency tow ant to get women the vote... Yes, women were targeted if they stespped outside social norms like that. How dare they want to drive or vote or.... *sigh*

9. Motherhood. For some time, people believed motherhood steadied sa woman with problems. Obviously, they were realllllly wrong. Hormonal wah-wahs from pregnancy only worsened such issues and some women suffered severe problems. We hae documented evidence of this as far back at least as 1100 AD in Europe. 

***

Now, the reason I say Jane Eyre is racist is because the first wife is describedd very nastily and it's attributed to her "darkness" (she's described as manyt ghings due to being born to English parebnts in Jamaica, oh no!) and Jane is very English. Yes, the English thought even being Italian or Span ish was "dark". You want people who think I'm not white enough? Welcome to the UK. No joke. I'm  not white enough for the Brexit crowd. WTF?

Speaking of people who need therapy! LOL

HUGS and PURRS, which I think are MUCH better therapy. Dahlia is now on skink kill number six in two months. She's having a blast. My local non-mammals are about to declare war, I expect.