<P> In modern times, insulin shock therapy and lobotomies are viewed as being almost as barbaric as the Bedlam "treatments", although the insulin shock therapy was still seen as the only option which produced any noticeable effect on patients . ECT is still used in the West, but it is seen as a last resort for treatment of mood disorders, and is administered much more safely than in the past . Elsewhere, particularly in India, use of ECT is reportedly increasing, as a cost - effective alternative to drug treatment . The effect of a shock on an overly excitable patient often allowed these patients to be discharged to their homes, which was seen by administrators (and often guardians) as a preferable solution to institutionalisation . Lobotomies were performed in the hundreds from the 1930s to the 1950s, and were ultimately replaced with modern psychotropic drugs . </P> <P> The eugenics movement of the early 20th century led to a number of countries enacting laws for the compulsory sterilization of the "feeble minded", which resulted in the forced sterilization of numerous psychiatric inmates . As late as the 1950s, laws in Japan allowed the forcible sterilization of patients with psychiatric illnesses . </P> <P> Under Nazi Germany, the Aktion T4 euthanasia program resulted in the killings of thousands of the mentally ill housed in state institutions . In 1939, the Nazis secretly began to exterminate the mentally ill in a euthanasia campaign . Around 6,000 disabled babies, children and teenagers were murdered by starvation or lethal injection . </P> <P> Psychiatrists around the world have been involved in the suppression of individual rights by states wherein the definitions of mental disease had been expanded to include political disobedience . Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined to mental institutions and abused therein . Psychiatry possesses a built - in capacity for abuse which is greater than in other areas of medicine . The diagnosis of mental disease can serve as proxy for the designation of social dissidents, allowing the state to hold persons against their will and to insist upon therapies that work in favour of ideological conformity and in the broader interests of society . </P>

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