Insane Asylums

“At its heart, the question of whether the same can be distinguished from the insane (and whether degrees of insanity can be distinguished from each other) is a simple matter: Do the salient characteristics that lead to a diagnosis reside in the patients themselves or in the environment and context in which observers find them?” (Rosenhan 1)

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

Asylums of the 20th century were deplorable places created for insane people because of the ignorance of the medical community about helping or treating the mentally ill, the way the asylums were use to get the insane out of the way, and the sheer fact that the hospitals felt the need to withhold the information about what was going on inside the institutions from the public. Some Americans today may believe that in the last few decades we had treated our patients suffering with mental illness with dignity and respect. However, the conditions in which many of them lived and the treatment they received were worse than that of animals. Treatments of these patients were so inhumane that, in Athens, Ohio, an asylum nicknamed the Ridges, a female patient named Margaret Schilling disappeared from one of the active wards. Schilling went missing on December 1, 1978, and on January 12, 1979, her body was found on an abandoned top floor of ward N. 20. The ward had been used for sick, infectious patients, and had been abandoned for years. When searching for Schilling, employees had forgotten to search in ward N. 20. Eventually, when Schilling was found, a maintenance man discovered her body lying on the floor in front of a window. Her body had been laying there for several weeks unattended. According to Carolyn M. Zimmerman, Ünige A. Laskay, and Glen P. Jackson, her body was left laying for so long that it had begun to rot and had left a stain that can still be seen today. This

In the Article “On Being Sane In Insane Places,” Rosenhan describes an experiment were eight mentally sane individuals enter 12 different hospitals. The objective of the study was to see how

My name is Desilla Bloodee. I am 23 years old. Some say I am a very mysterious woman. I have been described as brave, daring, free, unpredictable, bold, crazy, and many others that probably should not be said right this minute. They say I am not scared of anything. Some people aren 't. Now they will be for the rest of their lives. Not only this generation, but all generations after that.

As they were released, the majority were given the diagnosis of schizophrenia in remission, which according to Rosenhan (1973) meant that the staff did not suspect the pseudopatients were "sane". However, one question I had while reading this was why would the staff think the pseudopatients were faking? The pseudopatients checked themselves into the hospital, and the hospital's job is to help the patient. The pseudopatients were not actively diagnosed with schizophrenia, but they were "in remission" based on the symptoms Rosenhan (1973) had told them to display. Psychiatric diagnoses are complicated and there is not one perfect way that works, but one of the criteria is self-reported symptoms from the patient. If the pseudopatient originally described the symptoms he or she had, and they were similar to the symptoms schizophrenia, why would the staff question that? I can understand the criticism of the hospital not extensively fact-checking and testing the patients in the initial meeting; that probably should have been more standardized, and more testing should have been done before landing on one diagnosis and admitting them into the hospital. However, most of the psuedopatients were released in remission, meaning that they were exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia (i.e., when they first checked in), and now they are not (i.e., during their stay). This suggests that the staff did know the patients were no longer exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia, otherwise they may have not been released as quickly or released with a diagnosis of

It was a nice day in the mental asylum. When all of a sudden someone yelled for help me. So super cow came running into the room and found poker laying on the ground. With a pool of blood surrounding him. Trump was the first on the sean then supercow ask what happened and trump said his throw has been slit with a piece of glass milk bottle. Then trump said that could be only one person. And supercow ask who trump said the milker. Then supercow went outside and told bacon bites to get the other and met in trump's room. And so bacon bites told george and to get baboo. So george got babo who got picklerick. And before they all went to trump's room they brought up how poker liked meat and not vegetables. And then they went and supercow was waiting

There were eight participants (pseudopatients) in the study. Although pseudopatients (three females and five males) varied in their occupation - five professionals, a student, a painter and a housewife - the majority of them were familiar with the underlying issue of the study (Spitzer, 1976). Participants arranged their admission to psychiatric hospitals via the phone, complaining to hospital staff about hearing voices (auditory hallucinations). All pseudopatients, with the exception of one, were diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to psychiatric wards. After their admission, participants stopped simulating any psychological symptoms. The length of

We all have our own perception of psychiatric hospitals. Some people may see them as a terrifying experience, and others may see them as a way to help people who cannot keep their disorders under control. David Rosenhan's perception led him to a variety of questions. How could psychiatric hospitals know if a patient was insane or not? What is like to be a patient there? According to Rosenhans study, psychiatric hospitals have no way of truly knowing what patients are insane or not; they quickly jump to labeling and depersonalizing their patients instead of spending time with them to observe their personality.

While in the mental hospital, these sane people realised that the nurses would ignore patients and they would treat them inhumanely. This study is important because it shows that before admitting people into a mental hospital, it is necessary that more tests should be performed, in order to make sure that the people admitted actually have a mental disorder. This experiment and the way the sane people were diagnosed is an example of type one error. The clinicians saw one symptom of a mental illness and jumped to the conclusion that the person had schizophrenia.

Thinking about what the purpose of the DSM-5, this writer’s first idea was this book is a learning tool for students that will be working in the field of mental health. Although this book might be a learning tool or guide to students it is also a great resource for anyone working in the field of mental health. Imagine if each clinician had to learn on their own, retain all the information, none the less quickly recall all that information; it would be some phenomenal feet. The DSM was first published in 1952. Its’ purpose then and know are to help facilitate correct diagnosis of mental health disorders.

It is believed in order to fully be able to offer aid to the client, the clinician must understand the client fully. This is important because the clinician has to first assess before diagnosing and coming up with a treatment. An assessment is “simply collecting relevant information in an effort to reach a conclusion” (97). When the client is fully assessed and the clinician fully understands, the clinician can ease into treatment. The DSM-5 is the current assessment method and “is judged by its reliability and validity (117).” The DSM-5 is focused on the reliability and validity because the previous versions were sought to be too vague and not reliable. When diagnosing a client there are certain number of symptoms that have to be met however, these symptoms have to last a certain amount of time and impede on the client's everyday life. When a client is diagnosed with a disorder there is a significant chance that they suffer another disorder. When a client is diagnosed with agoraphobia there is a chance they suffer from panic disorder as

The findings had 193 patients labeled. Of the 193 patients 41 of the patients were labeled as pseudopatients by at least one or more staff members. Of the 41 patients 23 of the patients were thought by some psychiatrist’s to also be pseudopatients. Finally, 19 patients were suspected by at least one psychiatrist and also one staff member to be the pseudopatients. These findings showed how the staff failed to detect once again who was sane and who was not.

Over the course of history, insanity has been subjected to a wide variety of treatments. Attempts to cure the mentally ill or simply relieve "normal" society of the problems caused by insanity have ranged from outright cruelty to higher degrees of humanity in today's society. This paper gives a brief overview of insanity--its believed causes and subsequent treatments--from primitive times up to the nineteenth century.

Despite growing concerns by some professions on certain aspects of DSM within the mental health community, the DSM remains to be the standard assessment tool for diagnosis process to make it easier to access patients with mental health illnesses. DSM is a professional guide, but the DSM framework is designed to be used as one of many tools for proper diagnosis and treatment. There are many disadvantage and advantages to the DSM guide however as it is now in place and fully established, DSM is useful is diagnosing patients where it would have been previously extremely difficult. The DSM profiling is in place in order to create a more effective and efficient way of establishing a correct diagnosis for patients but with every invention comes error