How Did Dix's Life Changed

During the 1700’s the jails were not only used to confine criminals, but they confined people with mental illness as well. People with mental illness were subjected to inhumane treatment, even when the individual was admitted

Doretha Dix played a major role in the prison reforms. She stood up to the Massachusetts state legislature and told them that the sick and insane "confined in this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls,

Insane Asylums in the 1920-1930’s were disturbing places to live. Men and women were held in different wards, each ward had up to fifty patients (D’Antonio). Patients lived incredibly close to one another. Not one patient knew what

To begin with by examining Diox firmness, mentality , and heroic personality it was clear that Dorothea Dix was able to stop injustice going on in the East Cambridge prison. It all began that same year Diox and some friends travel to england, returning home different not the same girl she was when she left home. She had different interests, new approaches to the treatment of insane. Diox took a job teaching inmates in an East Cambridge prison, where the conditions were so abysmal and the treatment for prisoners so inhumane, that she began agitating at once their improvement. Prisoners at that time were unregulated and unhygienic, with violent criminals housed side by side with mental illness. Diox later on she began to visit every public and

"There are few cases in history where a social movement of such proportions can be attributed to the work of a single individual" (Kovach) At the age of thirty-nine, a woman by the name of Dorothea Dix devoted the rest of her life as an advocate to the humane attitude toward the mentally ill. She traveled the world from state to state visiting each and every prison, almhouse, asylum, orphanage, and hidden hovel documenting everything and anything she saw. After her intricate study of what she had been a witness of she wrote a letter or "memorial" and presented it to a legislator she knew who would present it to each legislature in each state she had studied. Dorothea Dix was the pioneering force in the movement to reform the

Many years ago, mental illness was viewed as a demonic possession or a religious punishment. In the 18th century, the attitudes towards mental illness were negative and persistent. This negativity leads to the stigmatization and confinement of those who were mentally ill. The mentally ill were sent to mental hospitals that were unhealthy and dangerous. A push in the mid 1950s for deinstitutionalization began because of activists lobbying for change. Dorothea Dix was one of these activists that helped push for change. The change called for more community oriented care rather than asylum based care. The Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 closed state psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States. "Only individuals who posed an imminent danger to themselves or someone else could be committed to state psychiatric hospitals" (A Brief History of Mental Illness and the U.S. Mental Health Care System). Deinstitutionalization meant to improve quality of life and treatment for those who are mentally ill. This would hopefully result in the mentally ill receiving treatment so they could live more independently. The hope was that community mental health programs would provide this treatment but sadly there was not sufficient or ongoing funding to meet the growing demand for these programs. Budgets for mental hospitals were reduced but there was no increase for the community based programs. Many mentally ill individuals have been moved to nursing homes or other residential

Doyle, Jim, and Peter Fimrite. "Caring for Mentally Ill Criminals Outside of Prison Is Dangerous." America's Prisons. Ed. Clare Hanrahan. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2006. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from "Criminally Insane Taking over State Hospitals." San Francisco Chronicle 22 July 2001. Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.

After being ill, Dix traveled to England to recover, in which she met reformer William Rathbone After Meeting Rathbone and his wife, Elizabeth, Dix had the spark to travel around England to volunteer to see the conditions the inmates were forced to lived with. After recovering, Dix returned to Boston in which she would travel to see the conditions of the prisons. In which she was shocked of the cruel punishments the inmates endured. She found people being locked in cages and child who were convicted of minor crimes being locked in cells with adults convicted of major crimes. She also visited different types of prisons included specific ones that included "debaters", jails that are for people who owe money. These were people that were imprisoned for years. This was because the prisoners were unable to work so they could not pay off the debt. Along with unfair imprisonment, there were also mentally ill patients that were being locked away." Most people were judged insane were locked away in dirty prison cells. If they misbehaved they were whipped (Par.3). This meant that the ill were not getting proper care and treatment. The only patients that would receive proper care were the rich and wealthy. After what she discovered, Dix published her findings and report the mistreatment to the Massachusetts State legislature. After being astonished by her findings, the legislature agrees to

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.

Dorothea L. Dix, after resigning from teaching, began to focus her time on inmates and the

Dorothea Lynde Dix was salient to the development of both the Reform and Civil War Eras that she lived during, and to the overall United States. Moreover, Dorothea Dix had minor, but crucial, contributions to the education of children during her early years, which would help her effort in creating different perspective and establishing institutions for the mentally ill. Her onerous efforts even required her to plead to the State Legislative body, which was essential in achieving her goals for the mentally ill. In addition, Dix contributed to the Civil War when she was appointed superintendent of nurses for the Union army. Dix’s action would leave a permanent mark to the character of the United States when she helped form institutions for the mentally ill and wrote the “Bill of the Benefit of the Indigent Insane.”

Wright, D. (1997). Getting out of the asylum: understanding the confinement of the insane in the nineteenth century. Social History of Medicine, 10, 13

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

Born in 1802, Dorothea Dix played an important role in changing the ways people thought about patients who were mentally-ill and handicapped. These patients had always been cast-off as “being punished by God”. She believed that that people of such standing would do better by being treated with love and caring rather than being put aside. As a social reformer, philanthropist, teacher, writer, writer, nurse, and humanitarian, Dorothea Dix devoted devoted her life to the welfare of the mentally-ill and handicapped. She accomplished many milestones throughout her life and forever changed the way patients are cared for. She was a pioneer in her time, taking on challenges that no other women would dare dream of tackling.

The means of violence and fighting back during the Romantic period developed the American identity into a more civilized and humane manner that handles conflicts in society and between two parties by its newly found ways of expression rather than violence. Throughout the reform era, between 1825-1850, America sought to expand its democratic ideals and a civilized approach to conflicts between two or more opposing sides. The first answer of solving a conflict typically ended in violence, but through the reforms of different systems and people in America, the options began to expand into less aggressive forms of resolution. One activist, Dorothea Dix, began striving for the improvement of the treatment of prisoners when she saw how they were being treated in an East Cambridge prison. During this time period, mentally ill and violent criminals were habituating together, leading to criminals violently beating and violating the mentally ill patients. Dix documented all of her discoveries in great detail to then be presented to the legislature of Massachusetts, where she demanded action towards reform. Her discoveries of these prisoner’s dramatic accounts of prisoners being starved, physically and sexually abused by their keepers, and even left naked without heat or sanitation. She writes how she actively makes an effort to help actually reform these people into functioning members of society rather than just locking them up and wasting money doing so; “I am the