Making Progress: Exorcizing the Demon | Sober and Unashamed

October is scary movie season for me. While watching The Exorcist a couple of weeks ago, it struck me how far we have come in the treatment of mental illness. The movie was made in 1973, and having the possessed girl talk to a psychiatrist was the absolute last resort. Psychiatrists were seen as kooks. The preferred treatment option, before talk therapy, was to drill into her skull and remove part of her brain.

I guess that is less an example of how far we have come, and more evidence of how recently we have been completely ass-backwards as it relates to mental health.

Of course, The Exorcist is a fictional movie about demonic possession, and no amount of talk therapy was going to help Linda Blair’s character, but you get my point. Mental health treatment was a lot like, “Ready, fire, aim,” for a very long time.

Our collective historical management of the biggest mental health crisis of them all — addiction to alcohol — would also make a compelling horror movie plot. Since the publication of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939, we have treated alcoholism as a spiritual deficiency. I wonder if Linda Blair is available to star in the movie version.

We have since learned that addiction is a neurological disease that results from the hijacking of brain chemicals…