Beautiful and educative as always. The mention of Bedlam reminded me of one of the most popular James Blunt's album 'Back to Bedlam'

It is sad to know that even till today, a lot of psychological and psychiatric disorders are attributed to the so-called demons and extraterrestrial causes, especially by religion. and it is not uncommon to see people with these problems in chains, churches or other spiritual establishments.

I'm quite surprised that bloodletting came up again as one of the obsolete ways of dealing with a psychiatric problem. I once wrote on bloodletting and all the pseudoscientific beliefs associated with it but I would have loved so see statistics on the effectiveness of that method in dealing with the problems back then.

I believe in DSM and psychotropic medication because of past experience. Someone who had a psychiatric problem was taken to a hospital (after days of praying in the church without result), after regaining her senses to a certain extent, she refused to take the drugs anymore, claiming that she's heard about the adverse side effects of the drugs. Although she was eventually convinced to continue taking the drug and she's perfectly fine now. This particular experience always remind me that a lot of mentally unstable folks I see roaming the streets around here could have been saved by a couple of drugs if only we can stop attributing these things to spiritual attacks and demons.