Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, 20 years on, the Kosovo crisis remembered by those forced to flee their homes.

And we just made to walk at a gunpoint down the street.

And there were rumors that they're going to separate man and boys take us to the city stadium and shoot us.

Plus America's attempt at post-war peacekeeping in China and from the 1970s a trailblazing gay marriage.

There was a cake with rather than a man and a woman on the top.

There was a bride and a groom.

There was two grooms. That's coming up later in the podcast. But first a

subject which has been gaining increasing currency in recent years especially in

the richer countries of the world. We're talking about the treatment of those with mental illness.

Although there's not much evidence to suggest levels of mental illness are increasing,

governments and health authorities around the globe are these days paying much more attention to its costs

both to the individual and to society. And the way mental illness is treated is evolving too.

From the tormenting, shackling and incarcerating of the surprisingly

recent past to the use of more effective drugs and therapies of today, we're going to focus

on a breakthrough which occurred in the 1950s with the development of the first antipsychotic drugs. Alex Last reports. So far as I'm concerned I still think it was a revolution.

It changed everything in psychiatry in the often simply locked away in psychiatric hospitals and asylums. In the 1950s in the United States alone

more than half a million were in public mental institutions where in many cases

conditions could be very harsh.

Among the most seriously ill long-term inmates

were those suffering from schizophrenia,

a mental illness that affects 1% of the population and causes psychotic symptoms.

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