The History of Insane Asylums Essay

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

In 1820, only one state hospital for people with mental illness existed in the United States, by the close of the Civil War, practically every state had established one or more institutions for mental health purposes. Between 1838 and 1898, Ohio alone opened seven asylums, including the Athens Asylum in 1874. As asylums dotted across Ohio and in the major hubs like Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton, a location was needed for an asylum in the southern region of the state. The Athens Lunatic Asylum would serve twenty-nine counties in southeastern Ohio.

However, this was not all that the Act changed. The Lunatics Act in conjunction with the County Asylums Act also regulated asylum construction and compelled counties to provide asylum for lunatics, provided a salary for “the medical and legal Commissioners…created a more detailed medical certification procedure, and establishments had to keep…detailed records of admission, discharge or death, escape or transfer, restraint, seclusion, and injury of those placed in the asylum” (German E. Berrios, Hugh Freeman 92, 93). The significance of the Lunatics/County Asylums Act of 1845 in addition to the mass construction of asylums, the new Lunacy Commissioners, inspection, record keeping, licensing, reporting and certifications is that these Acts “saw

Private asylums seem to be like summer camps. In both instances, you are constantly watched and monitored as so you don’t hurt yourselves or others, you are fed, and given a place to sleep. Public asylums are the ones that horror movies and games are based off of. The dingy walls, medical smell and patients that may not be as mild mannered as the private asylum patrons. When presented with the article: Fear and Brutality in a Creedmoor Ward, Philip Shenan describes the lowly treatment of patients locked in the in Creedmoor public asylum. This article helps state the facts about how public asylums aren’t safe for patients nor are they safe for the doctors that work there. And most of the time the people that go into public asylums aren’t getting the help they need. Overall it is more worth it to spend extreme amounts of money on private care over spending nothing and going to a public asylum.

But other patients had reasons to be in the asylum. On Tennessee Genealogical Society web site you can read why mentally healthy women went to the insane asylums. Some of the women were put in the asylum because they questioned the authority of their husbands or they were not good housewives. Any woman was at risk of being put in an insane hospital if they did either one of those. Also, if women got to old the husband could have her put in a hospital and take a younger wife. Once a woman was committed, it was as if she died, an obituary was published, usually. A landlord could have a person committed for not paying rent. A boss could have an employee committed if they were slow or a bad employee. People could be committed if they were poor, being an alcoholic, a person with a short fuse, or anyone who deviated from the normal thing society thought was right. These could go for men or women, but most were filled with women. Also, children who acted out or had mental or physical disabilities were also placed in mental asylums. A blind child or a child with a speech problem would be locked away for the rest of their life just because they had a birth

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

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 mood shifted from hiding the mentally ill to curing the mentally ill. The definition of mentally ill was expanded to include anyone in the family that was unable to help the family in terms of survival and drained their family of money and resources: the aged, the epileptic, and the imbecilic. This caused massive overcrowding. The mentally ill were hidden from the public view along with the elderly and others suffering from debilitating disorders resulting in massive overcrowding of asylums which meant illnesses were not being treated in lieu of managing the ever expanding population.

Around the 1970’s and 1980’s around the United States many mental hospitals were shut down. There were many reasons why they closed these Asylums was because money, and knowing that there was only about twenty county asylums were built around the country. The asylums also known as the Looney bin was established in Britain after passing in 1808 county asylum act. There were so many patients in these asylums around the world in 1955 about 558,239 severely mentally ill people in the United States were accounted for. Now in these times any mentally ill people don’t get help they just go straight to jail without proper diagnosis or treatment. People need to know these people need extreme care and treatment. Even regular people or considered the norm in today’s society eventually go crazy when they’re in prison too long. We have as much people that are mentally ill as regularly incarcerated. There is one prison in Houston Texas that does take care there mentally ill. We have about 2.2 million

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

In the 1800’s, it was perfectly reasonable for a man to send his wife, daughters and even sisters to an asylum, after deeming them to be madmen, or rather mad women. At the time, the majority of people believed it to be in the best interest of the general public if scandalous as well as mentally unstable people were confined to a more isolated area. To justify these actions, many reasoned that confinement of the insane individuals would prevent them from hurting

Institutional care was condemned, as in many cases patients’ mental conditions deteriorated, and institutions were not able to treat the individual in a holistic manner. In many state institutions, patients numerously outnumbered the poorly trained staff. Many patients were boarded in these facilities for extensive periods of time without receiving any services. By 1963, the average stay for an individual with a diagnosis of schizophrenia was eleven years. As the media and newspapers publicized the inhumane conditions that existed in many psychiatric hospitals, awareness grew and there was much public pressure to create improved treatment options (Young Minds Advocacy, 2016). .

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

During the mid-1800’s the mentally ill were either homeless or locked in a cell under deplorable conditions. Introduction of asylums was a way to get the mentally ill better care and better- living conditions. Over a period of years, the admissions grew, but staff to take care of their needs did not. Asylums became overcrowded and treatments that were thought to cure, were basically medieval and unethical

The mentally ill were cared for at home by their families until the state recognized that it was a problem that was not going to go away. In response, the state built asylums. These asylums were horrendous; people were chained in basements and treated with cruelty. Though it was the asylums that were to blame for the inhumane treatment of the patients, it was perceived that the mentally ill were untamed crazy beasts that needed to be isolated and dealt with accordingly. In the opinion of the average citizen, the mentally ill only had themselves to blame (Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health, 1999). Unfortunately, that view has haunted society and left a lasting impression on the minds of Americans. In the era of "moral treatment", that view was repetitively attempted to be altered. Asylums became "mental hospitals" in hope of driving away the stigma yet nothing really changed. They still were built for the untreatable chronic patients and due to the extensive stay and seemingly failed treatments of many of the patients, the rest of the society believed that once you went away, you were gone for good. Then the era of "mental hygiene" began late in the nineteenth century. This combined new concepts of public health, scientific medicine, and social awareness. Yet despite these advancements, another change had to be made. The era was called "community mental health" and