Theories Of Mental Health In Victorian England

Mental health began to take hold in the 1980s it was influenced by the development of patients councils in both the united states and holland.

In Bly’s time, mental illnesses were not taken seriously. Bly described the asylum she was admitted to as overcrowded, cold, and dirty (ch. 7). It defeated the purpose of trying to give extra attention to those in need. It was easy to get admitted into an institution, but nearly impossible to make it out because the treatment was not treatment.

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

“It was believed that the body has four humors- Phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. In a healthy person these were in balance, while illness was caused by too much or too little of one of them. ”(barber 5). Any type of illness was explained by the four humors. In that time period, they didn't know any other way to explain mental or physical illness, so they relied of thing are now proven wrong to explain them.

A) Since the marking of its Constitution in 1946, the World Health Organization has never showed signs of change its definition for wellbeing. To the World Health Organization, despite the fact that the changing motion and assets over the globe, the center will continue as before; wellbeing is vital. Prior to the foundation of the World Health Organization, there was next to no attention on worldwide wellbeing. The rise of worldwide coordinated effort encompassing the theme of wellbeing rose as a consequence of the expanding network of the world. In the 1800s, expanded exchange and go between the East and Europe prompted the flare-up and fast spread of cholera and other pandemic ailments. As a reaction to the scourges of Asiatic cholera and other remote epidemics, the International

Mental illness has become a topic of discussion in recent years more so than ever before. From celebrities to teenagers, everyone has had some sort of encounter with this issue, and the increased awareness of the importance of mental health has led to numerous advancements that are changing the lives of people everywhere. But, although it has recently begun to break societal norms and make its way into public discussion, mental health has long been an unspoken problem for many. In Elizabethan England, topics such as this were virtually unheard of. Shakespeare, however, became one of the first people to bring the idea of mental illness to light, giving many of his characters qualities that ordinary people could recognize as abnormal but did

Until the late 1800’s when psychoanalysis was introduced, there was little to no distinction between classifications of mental illness. The female protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Bartleby of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivenor” are both characters that seem to suffer from depression. Gilman’s narrator suffers from a ‘temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency’ that regresses into insanity and irrational behavior as Bartley is unmotivated, passive resistant and reticent. The regressing mental illnesses of the

During the Victorian Era there was a great race to use science to alleviate the suffering of the ill, specifically for those patients who were suffering from ailments of the mind. While some of the methods used to diagnose and treat such afflictions would be considered barbaric in nature by today’s standards, they were considered cutting edge medical science during the time of the Victorian Era. It was also considered standard practice to conduct experiments in the name of science to seek treatments for mental as well as physical illnesses, but sometimes the outcome was worse than the initial problem. In the Scottish novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, science is heavily relied upon by the main characters as a means of diagnosis and treatment for what is revealed to be the unusual illness of Henry Jekyll. Additionally, the question of where morality fits into science is also applied to the strange events surrounding Dr. Jekyll and his mysterious companion. The question that will be examined in this paper deals with the nature of the hopes and fears Victorian society places into science where it concerns the treatment of illness and whether or not the acts of Edward Hyde constitute someone who is truly mentally ill, or if they are mere representations of the darker side of human nature.

Mental illness in the Victorian era was in no way looked at with the same perspective that it is today. Unlike the Victorian Era, today’s society generally treats its mentally ill members with compassion and sympathy, not disgust and ill-treatment. However, many years ago the opposite of today’s treatment was very much acceptable. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set in Victorian England, demonstrates such difference, as it is acceptable for a woman to be hidden and put under lock in key solely for reasons of insanity. Yet, with many differences in Brontë’s story and the current world, one concept may remain the same: woman driven mad by man.

Although Franz Mesmer was labeled as a fraud, he provided a basis for later psychoanalytic techniques such as hypnotism. As research of mental illness developed, mental disorders were classified as psychological illnesses instead of physiological illnesses. In light of this, physicians created ways to test the brain for mental illness: cranial capacity research and phrenology.

The Victorian mental institutions did bring some good to the patients at the time, it was the first time they were actually acknowledge as people instead of animals. Although this was really the only positive as the institutions were still horrific places where the inmates were put into poor conditions and constantly teased and beaten. The nurses forced the patients to do things to do things and if they did not then they would be harshly punished with beatings. Punishments were ice baths, on the whirling chair or just plainly beaten. These things did not improve their mental state as beating never really tend to do. The conditions were also so poor that the food there was inedible, this of course also did not improve a person's mental state

Franz Joseph Gall was born on March 9th, 1758 in the village of Tieffenbron. Gall was one of twelve children but only seven of which lived to adulthood. He was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain, which later became called phrenology (Swisher 23-24). He is claimed to be the founder of Phrenology and was the son of Anna Maria Billingerin and Joseph Anthony Gall. His father was a merchant, but at times the town’s mayor (“Franz Joseph Gall”). Gall’s interest in the study of people’s psychophysical characteristics began when he observed his siblings and friends noticing their different properties.

Imagine what it feels like when frustrating waves of pain sweep through the body. This unpleasantness can be felt by writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was known to have some sort of chronic illness in her lifetime. Much of Browning’s work has a dreary and pessimistic theme to it. Browning was able to use experiences such as chronic illness or personal romance (or lack of) to enhance the writing and provide perspective within each text. In sonnets 1, 28, and 43, Browning uses a form of sonnet writing called Italian (or Petrarchan), which uses a rhyme scheme of ‘aabbaabb’ or ‘cdecde’; this adds a rhyme to the last word of each line that subsequently matches with its respective letter. Another part of the

When psychology emerged as a discipline, there were four major schools that became popular. Phrenology, which is Greek for the study of the mind, was one of the earliest schools of psychology and became wildly popular in the 1800’s. German physician Franz Joseph Gall is the main theorist responsible for the ideas of phrenology. “Phrenologists argued that different brain areas accounted for specific character and personality traits, such as stinginess and religiosity, and that such traits could be read from bumps on the skull (Wade, Travis, & Gary, 2008/2012/2015, p. 5). It was through this idea that phrenologists believed that destructive people had larger bumps over their ears, an area representative of destruction. This, of course, lead to

Franz Joseph Gall created the main principles of phrenology, which was the first scientific theory of brain localization. His theories were based entirely on observation and natural philosophy. Phrenology was the study of associating an individual’s personality characteristics and mental abilities based on the shape of their skull. It was incomparably influential throughout the first half of the 19th century thanks to Gall and his many successors. Some of the main tenants of phrenology were later confirmed by scientific experiments and technology.