IF YOU HAVE seen the Academy Award-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, you probably will remember the scene in which Russell Crowe, tied to a bed, goes into convulsions when he is subjected to 'shock therapy' during psychiatric treatment.
In the movie, Crowe played Nobel prize winner John F. Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia while studying at Princeton University in the United States. The treatment available to the mathematics genius in real life in the 1950s was called an insulin shock, which is no longer in use. It makes the patient suffer violent muscular contractions.
What's good about movies is that they introduce us to new things. Yet, sometimes, there is a darker side. For example, we remember the terrifying white-walled room, with only a bed and electrical equipment, in A Beautiful Mind. Such scenes are likely to give a bad name to the psychiatric profession.
However, the on-going exhibition,' A close look at the history of psychiatric services in Hong Kong', will dispel your fears. The display, at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, reveals the truth about this little-known field of the medical profession and tries to put a positive spin on it.
You can learn about the local developments over the past 150 years, from the time when there were no government institutions for the mentally ill to the well-equipped hospitals of the present day.
Before 1875, European psychiatric patients were confined to Victoria prison in Mid-Levels, while Chinese patients were sent to Tung Wah Hospital in Sheung Wan. The facilities at the time were primitive. The hospital wards were dark and dreary. Patients prone to violence were chained up like animals.
