American Asylums In The 1800s

The first colonists blamed mental illness on witchcraft and demonic possession. The mentally ill were often imprisoned or sent to poorhouses. If they didn’t go to one of those they were left untreated at their home. Conditions in the prisons were awful. In 1841, a lady named Dorothea Dix volunteered to teach a Sunday-school class for the female inmates. She was outraged with the conditions of the prisons that she witnessed. Dix then went on to be a renowned advocate for the mentally ill. She urged more humane treatment-based care than what was given to the mentally ill in the prisons. In 1847, she urged that the Illinois legislature to provide an appropriate

During the 1800s, treating individuals with psychological issues was a problematic and disturbing issue. Society didn’t understand mental illness very well, so the mentally ill individuals were sent to asylums primarily to get them off the streets. Patients in asylums were usually subjected to conditions that today we would consider horrific and inhumane due to the lack of knowledge on mental illnesses.

brain, or sending patients to institutions, doctor prescribed pills to try and treat mental conditions. In addition mental health patients were no longer being institutionalized due to the poor conditions in mental institutions (History of Mental Illness”)

Until 1751, mentally ill people were placed in poorhouses because of the English poor laws of 1597 and 1601. Anyone that did not, or could not conform to societal norms was placed into these poorhouses, including the mentally ill or retarded, the physically disabled, and the homeless. Eventually, mental disabilities began to be considered different from other types of disabilities, and in 1751 Dr. Thomas Bond founded the first psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania.(Johnson 5-6) In 1773, another psychiatric hospital was built in Williamsburg, Virginia, and was called the Eastern Lunatic Asylum. It only had 20 beds, and was never completely filled until the nineteenth century.(Torrey 81) Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of moral treatment was

The United States has never had an official federal-centered approach for mental health care facilities, entrusting its responsibility to the states throughout the history. The earliest initiatives in this field took place in the 18th century, when Virginia built its first asylum and Pennsylvania Hospital reserved its basement to house individuals with mental disorders (Sundararaman, 2009). During the 19th century, other services were built, but their overall lack of quality was alarming. Even then, researchers and professionals in the mental health field attempted to implement the principles of the so-called public health, focusing on prevention and early intervention, but the funds were in the hands of the local governments, which prevented significant advances in this direction.

The mentally ill were treated very inhumanly in the early insane asylums. Some of the

Unfortunately, asylum founders could only guess at the causes of insanity. Patient after patient was admitted into the state hospitals, but the cause of their disturbance was often a mystery. Many were inflicted with various organic diseases, like dementia, Huntington’s disease, brain tumors, and many were in the third stage of syphilis. With no treatments available, providing humane care was all that could be done. In the years following the civil war American cities boomed and the asylum began struggling to keep up. Soldiers, freed slaves, and immigrants were stranded in a strange land. The asylum became organized more like a factory or small town. There were upper and lower classman, bosses and workers, patients with nothing, and patients with privileges. Sarah Burrows, a schizophrenic and daughter of a wealthy doctor had a ten bedroom house that was built for her on the hospital grounds. Burrows home was just a stone’s throw away from the hospital’s west wing, where over sixty black women slept side by side. (Asylum: A History of the Mental Institution in America). The hospital began to rely on the free labor the patients provided. However, isolating the hospital from the community meant there was no way of knowing what was happening inside the asylum. The asylum became a world apart. In the 1870’s, Elizabeth Packard, a former patient of St. Elizabeth’s, wrote about her mistreatment and abuse

Many families that had a mentally ill family member often thought they were under a demonic possession and a priest or religious figure would preform an exorcism to try and rid the body of the spirits. Most of the time this did not work as medically the patients were not possessed by a presence but rather a just mentally ill. So, the need to provide a care and treatment facility was the reason behind the creation of many asylums.

Throughout history, human societies have had conflicting views on insanity and how it is defined in life. Primitive cultures found peace within shamans and witch doctors because they believed the insane were possessed by evil spirits. From then on, in Roman and Greek cultures, there was a somewhat progressive ideology that mental illness came from biological and emotional ailments. They believed in treating those with mental disorders humanely and respectfully which is an attitude that has been forgotten through history and sadly, still is today. However, the Middle Ages became the end of these progressive ideas and introduced insane asylums who “helped” the mentally ill. Up until the 20th century, insane asylums were used to restrict

In the early part of America’s history, people who had mental illnesses were placed in institutions that were quite similar to jails. Once inside these facilities, people simply weren’t given the opportunity to leave, no matter how much they might want to do so. In addition, some of these facilities had terrible procedural rules that allowed people with illnesses to be treated in ways that were unspeakably cruel. (“History of Mental Health”, 2017) People with mental illness were seen to be a burden to their family. Some early counselors did not see their patients as humans, but more animals who needed to be trained. Forms of treatment were cruel and abusive. People working in institutions were not formally trained.

In Bethlem Royal Hospital, treatment was carried out by non-licensed practitioners, and they ran as an enterprise. In the late 1800's, moral treatment for patients pioneered ( "The History of the Asylum" ). Moral treatment is where to recover from mental illness by treating kindly in rational parts of minds. It was believed to eventually cure mental illnesses. Prestigious private hospitals tried to implement some parts of moral treatment on the wards that held the mentall ill. If the patients were good they were rewarded for natural or rational behaviors. However, gentler kinds of restraints were used for shorter periods. The first institution to be specially built for moral treatment was the Friends Asylum in 1814 by Phil Quaker ( D' Antonio

In the 1800’s, it was perfectly reasonable for a man to send his wife, daughters and even sisters to an asylum, after deeming them to be madmen, or rather mad women. At the time, the majority of people believed it to be in the best interest of the general public if scandalous as well as mentally unstable people were confined to a more isolated area. To justify these actions, many reasoned that confinement of the insane individuals would prevent them from hurting

Later on, in history, people began building asylums for their mentally ill citizens to protect the public from them. Millions of people were placed into asylums against their will and were subjects to inhuman treatments. The patients were housed together in poorly ventilated rooms where they lived in their own excrement. Treatment from staff from cruel and abusive; the patients were subjected to beatings, isolation, bloodletting, electro-shock therapy as well as sexual and emotional abuse. Tens of thousands of people were subject to the torturous treatments and barely any survived to tell the tale.

The public asylums used Tuke's and Pinel's methods combine to manage the patients. They had created medical versions of moral treatment. The asylums had been carefully designed so that the environment had a strong father figure which calmed the patients and restored their sanity, but the physicians exaggerated claims of curing the 'lunacy' backfired. The buildings became over crowded and by 1890 the majority of patients left only in coffins. Old techniques soon returned, this being of straitjackets, seclusions and sedative drugs.

The world of State Hospitals and Psychiatric Nursing, literally a world that horror movies are made of. The history of mental health treatment is barbaric, including lobotomies, being wrapped in wet sheets until hypothermia set in, the electric shock treatments, lest we forget the twisted experts thinking of incestual everything in who became the “father of psychiatry” Sigmund Freud. Patient Rights were nonexistent, people were disposed of at the “sanitarium” they were locked up, chained to walls, and left eternally alone. Through out the past century there were some reforms made. The last large reform with “Beers” in the 1800’s. Mostly, that patients who were mentally ill were not “possessed by evil demons.” Or, that one cure to insanity