Psychiatry In The 1800s

Psychiatry is a type of science that involves mental illnesses and diagnosing the patient's’ mental, and sometimes physical, health. Psychiatrists are doctors that are trained to diagnose mental illnesses, and spot mental, emotional and behavioral symptoms. They work with their patients, listening to their stories, and performing tests in order to find out what, if any, mental illnesses or cognitive disorders. The median annual salary for a psychiatrist is around $200,000.

The dangerous and suicidal patients were tied together with ropes to help isolate them from the rest (ch. 14). The nurses were very obnoxious and abusive. For example, they would tell the patients to shut up and that they would beat them if they talked (Bly, ch. 12). Throughout Bly’s experience she talked with other patients, which convinced her that some were as sane as she was. Ultimately, society could not determine who was actually insane or sane due to their 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”)

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

When doing research I found that Benjamin Rush was the father of the American Psychiatry from 1745 to 1813. Rush claimed that “the cause of madness is seated primarily in the blood vessels of the brain” and that mental derangement occurs because the brain is “overcharged” with blood. Also, I researched that Rush had a “Negritude”. In 1797, Rush declared that blacks suffered from a disease called negritude. This he claimed derived from leprosy and caused the skin to be dark and that segregation would therefore prevent infection. He stated that the skin turning white, at which point the person would be considered sane, signified the only cure.

Psychiatric and Mental Health Care in the 1920’s - 1930’s Psychiatric and mental health care is very different now than it was throughout history. It was often reported that patients with these illnesses were often tested on and mistreated due to the lack of experience with families, doctors, and professionals. During this time doctors used different treatments and medication to see how the patients would react to it. Some of these illnesses were also mistaken and misunderstood and were thought to be a curse or a demonic possession and were treated by exorcisms and different rituals.

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.

The mentally ill of decades past particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not necessarily seen or treated as a criminal element although the services and techniques that were employed by the medical establishment could be seen by today's standards as barbaric, this was not in ill will or some form of belligerence on the part of the doctors from the recent past but more attuned to not really understanding the complexities of the human psyche. Today although there appears to be a better grasps on the mental conditions that afflict people with mental disorders the asylum and mental hospitals that remain today do not suffer as much from the shortcomings of treatment and diagnostic techniques of the past, but a more plebeian

The analogy used by Thomas Szasz in his article is that during historical periods, there was no such thing as witches, only women who were rejected by society and were so called witches. Similarly, Szasz explains that there is no such thing as mental disease, just behaviors disapproved by psychiatrist which they label mental illness. For example, psychiatrists will label a person who fears going out into the open as “agoraphobic” and claim it’s an illness. Szasz adds that the diagnostics of mental illness are solemnly made by the judgement of a psychiatrist or the patient himself and has no scientific or medical basis. Moreover, he postulates that psychiatry is heavily tied to ethics and that a psychiatrist’s socio-ethical beliefs can influence is or her ideas on what’s wrong with the patient.

Mental Disorders date back to the beginning of mankind, but mental institutions and treatments for these disorders do not. In the beginning people believed that a mental disorder meant a person was being possessed or was the work of witchcraft. This brought along a social stigma to the disorder as people did not want to associate themselves with those things. In turn, the mentally disabled people were sent to prisons, poorhouses, abandoned or left at their own houses. People before the Victorian Era did not care about mentally disabled people, they put them in the back of their minds and continued on with their lives. Going into the Victorian Era the image of the institution started to change, people started to change their minds and the government did as well. In 1841 England they passed a law that required institutions to have a higher level of standards than they did before. During the Victorian Era people realized that it was actually a serious medical problem and something that a person needs treatment for. When the mental institutions first started they were basically prisons that really only separated the insane from regular citizens. Nevertheless it was a step up from being cast away from society like the insane had been. Even with the reforms and the better looking future for the mental institutions, they were still horrific places where the food was on the brink of edible and the living quarters were crowded and filthy. The nurses and doctors would often mentally

The implications for committing acts of misdiagnosing clients affect not only the clients but also the clinicians. The saying “ Do no Harm” is often associated in the field of social work and is a reminder to all social workers to put the needs of clients before those of the clinician (NASW Code of Ethics 1996). Clients trust their clinicians and view them as the expert to help them resolve the issues that have led them to seek assistance in the first place. Trust is broken when the clinician expresses their reasoning to the client for the misdiagnose, and the innocent client is easily manipulated into believing that the clinician has their best interest in mind, when in fact, they do not. Not providing the client with the proper may lead to catastrophic outcomes for the client. By breaking the confidence on the clinician by faulty and intentionally misleadings for whatever purpose, may prevent the client from trusting the social work/mental health profession as a whole. If this were to occur, it might prevent someone from future

In the Victorian era (during the 1800s), it was a common belief that people with psychological illnesses were adulterated by the devil. Patients with these conditions were treated imperfectly and lived in unsanitary conditions. For example, most patients lived in cages, and were given minimal amounts of food, much like animals in captivity. As science progressed, a new perspective formed that challenged the original beliefs people had about mental illnesses. Not only did society make progress in the medicine involved in psychological illnesses, but they also made progress in the perception of these patients.

In the early centuries the mentally ill were believed to be possessed by demons or in need of religion. These negative attitudes lead to people with mental illness having a stigma placed on them. In the mid-19th century, William Sweetser was the first to coin the term “mental hygiene”, which can be seen as a precursor to contemporary approaches to work on promoting positive mental health. (Wikipedia,

The understanding of mental illness in society has come a long way since before Christ’s time. In the past mental illness was thought of as demonic possessions and or religious penance (Foerschner, 2010). It was Hippocrates who began to treat mental illness as a disorder and not a supernatural phenomenon (PBS, 2015). Yet, treatment of people with mental disorders in the past was not done in a humanistic manner though asylums or mental health facilities were built in order to provide care for them. These facilities gave way for developing frowned upon psychiatric treatments such as lobotomies and shock therapies which further disabled cognitive control (Freeman, 2015). Mental disorders at the time were associated with terms like lunacy, melancholies and hysteria but with time these disorders have been studied and categorized to broader groupings such as but not limited to Major Depression Disorders, Autism, Schizophrenia, Substance –Related and Addictive Disorders, Bipolar Disorder, and Personality Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Mental health was a very misunderstood concept within Victorian England. Everything a doctor knew was based off of pseudosciences. Their mental illness studies were conducted based off of the beliefs of phrenology, physiognomy, palmistry, and graphology. Phrenology was a belief that mental illness could be detected dependent upon the size of a person’s brain. England’s doctors also believed mental illnesses had to do with a person’s facial features, the lines in their hands, their race, or even their handwriting. These misconceptions influenced psychiatrists to research and test irrelevant regimens and did not advance their knowledge on current mental illnesses. Their lack of knowledge caused healthy people unnecessary treatment and confinement and lead to inaccurate diagnoses of the patients.