Mentally Ill In The 19th Century

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

There was still a large lack of understanding that what caused mental illness the 1930’s, however people still wanted to treat mental illness so this brought more therapeutic ideas on how to cure it. In 1933, two neurologists at Yale Primate Laboratory, Dr. Fulton and Jacobson, performed experiments on two monkeys. They tested the intelligence of the monkeys before and after the removal of half the brains’ frontal lobes. They seemed to retain their skills and intelligence. Fulton and Jacobson wanted to take this a little further, they removed the other half of the frontal lobe. They discovered that the monkeys no longer became violent and frustrated when they didn't immediately get their treats after completing the intelligence test [9].

Illness is one of the few experiences that all humans have in common and generally is met with empathy. However, people who suffer from mental illness are not privy to this treatment. For centuries, mental disorders have been demonized and stigmatized even in the modern era where humans have a much better understand of the mechanisms of the mind. Before the advent of psychiatry in the eighteenth-century people believed that mental illness was actually demonic possession resulting in the ostracization and murder of the mentally ill in the name of God. The Victorian era was met with a different view of mental illness, in that it was understood that it was a malady of the mind and people needed constant medical treatment, thus federally mandated asylums were created. Since mental illness was not understood there was a lot of misconceptions and fear surrounding the field. It is no surprise that the master of macabre and the creator of Horror, Edgar Allen Poe, decided to explore themes of mental illness in his stories. Poe’s most famous story about mental illness was The Fall of the House of Usher, where the main characters are plagued with an undisclosed mental malady. Through Poe’s use of point of view, style, tone, and tropes, he painted a perfect picture of the Victorian view of the mentally ill and the mind of the artist which was believed to be different faces of the same coin.

In early American history, individuals with mental illnesses have been neglected and suffered inhuman treatments. Some were beaten, lobotomized, sterilized, restrained, in addition to other kinds of abuse. Mental illness was thought to be the cause of supernatural dreadful curse from the Gods or a demonic possession. Trepanning (the opening of the skull) is the earliest known treatment for individuals with mental illness. This practice was believed to release evil spirits (Kemp, 2007). Laws were passed giving power to take custody over the mentally ill including selling their possessions and properties and be imprisoned (Kofman, 2012). The first psychiatric hospital in the U.S. was the Pennsylvania Hospital where mentally ill patients were left in cold basements because they were considered not affected by cold or hot environments and restraint with iron shackles. They were put on display like zoo animals to the public for sell by the doctors (Kofmen, 2012). These individuals were punished and isolated and kept far out of the eyes of society, hidden as if they did not exist. They were either maintained by living with their families and considered a source of embarrassment or institutionalized

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

Hippocrates was the first to recognize that mental illness was due to ‘disturbed physiology’ as opposed to ‘displeasure of the gods or evidence of demonic possession’. It was not until about one thousand years later that the first place designated for the mentally ill came to be in 15th century Spain. Before the 15th century, it was largely up to individual’s families to care for them. By the 17th century, society was ‘often housing them with handicapped people, vagrants, and delinquents. Those considered insane are increasingly treated inhumanely, often chained to walls and kept in dungeons’. There are great strides for the medical treatments for the mentally

As you will see in this paper, mental illness has been a serious situation for many years. Over the years, there have been different thoughts relating to the causes of mental illness including what the actual situation is and observance of how to treat the mentally ill. This paper will inform you of three different historical periods: Colonial America, Depression & the New Deal and War & Prosperity in which an important aspect of mental health happened in each. I will include some religious and economic information for each period due to the relationship that religion and economy had to the way mental illness was viewed and treated in those periods.

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.

The treatment of mental illness has gone through many reforms over the years. Stemming from some of the earliest documented cases of treatment such as trephination in 5000 B.C. to the opening of “mental” asylums starting in the late 1300s to the development of the modern healthcare system. Through the 1800s until now, major developments in mental health treatment include the evolution of the “mental” asylum, widespread psychopharmacology, and psychotherapy treatments. Primarily focusing on the treatment methods of the past two hundred or so years, the United States of America has made leaps and bounds to provide humane treatment to aid those in need.

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”)

Mental health services in St. Louis have undergone a multitude of changes as stigmas towards mental health issues have begun to change. Traditionally, mentally ill individuals were thought to be lacking religion or in trouble in the eyes of God, and this thought process was believed until after the Middle Ages. These beliefs may have changed, but the attitudes towards the mentally ill were continued into the 18th century and beyond, which caused an increase in the stigmatization of mental illness, and thus subjected these individuals to humiliating and unhealthy conditions found in the original confinement of mentally ill patients, asylums. The government created mental health asylums, which separated these individuals from their societies,

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

Part one spans over the years 1750-1900, and elaborates on the developments of varying treatments that were administered to mental patients during this time. Whitaker writes of methods like dunking the patients in water, bloodletting, the tranquilizer

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

Through the course of time, mental illnesses have always been in existence due to varying factors and causes. However, as time has passed, the perceptions and available treatments for mental illnesses have also changed as new technology was developed. By looking at the treatments and perceptions of mental illnesses in the early 20th century, we can learn how to properly treat and diagnose not only mental disorders but also other conditions as well as show us the importance of review boards and controlled clinical trials.