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Elizabeth Packard once wrote in her book, The Prisoner's' Hidden Life, “The great evil of our present Insane Asylum System lies in the fact that insanity is there treated as a crime, instead of a misfortune, which is indeed a gross act of injustice.” In the 1800s, asylum’s for women were running rampant in the United States. Though asylum’s were meant to help women with mental disabilities, many times they caused more harm than good. Due to the restriction of women’s rights in the 1800s, placing women in asylums greater suppressed them more, than helped.
Elizabeth Packard is an example of this. In 1860, her husband submitted her to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane for publicly expressing religious beliefs contradictory to her spouse.
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Packard lived in the hospital for three years, till she was released back to her husband in 1863. This example proves asylums where another tool for men to suppress women. During this time, it was legal for a husband to have his wife admitted to the hospital without public consent or her agreement. Whatever rights women did have at the time, which were described as,”Rights for which a revolution was fomented were denied women – as they were to slaves, ‘lunatics,’ and ‘idiots.’ ”, according to connerpraivie.org, mattered little when it came to admission into asylums. Packard writes in her book, The Prisoner's’ Hidden Life, about doctors trying to convince her to change her believes and verbally announce her insanity. When she would not change her mind, nor admit to insanity, she was transferred to the violent and hopelessly insane ward. Packard's writing proves the further suppression of women in the asylum. Whenever she would deny being insane and refused to morph her believes to her husband, she was written off as violent and hopelessly insane. If Packard did not morph to the how man wanted her to think she was deemed mentally disabled. In Packard's case, mental disability was used as a diagnosis for trying to break out of the “man's world”. Another example of asylum suppression women can be found in this photo. Plan Of The Worcester Lunatic Hospital The photo is a blueprint of a State Lunatic Hospital At Worcester, Mass in the early 1833. The scale for the photo is forty feet to an inch. In this asylum, there is six rooms for every forty feet. These rooms were meant for one patient each. This photo shows, how awful life was in the asylum. Each room was closet size, and many times patients were kept in isolation. This photo shows how the reality of oppression of women in this time period. Adeline T.P. Lunt writes in her journal during her time in asylum, “Insane Asylum. A place where insanity is made.” Lunt’s writes about the isolation rooms and the treatment she undergoes. Her writings prove asylums caused more mental sickness, then a mental cure. The journal proves this by going into depth about women who would go to isolation rooms quit normal and return a new person stricken with mental illness. Furthermore, Nellie Bly goes into more depth, in 1887, about the suppression of women in asylum in her book, Ten Days in the Madhouse.
The book goes into detail about Bly faking being mentally ill and admitted into an asylum. In her experience she records accounts of women being verbally and physically abused by doctors and denied basic hygiene. Bly wrote, “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? . . . Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.” The experience written about in Ten Days in the Madhouse proves how unjustly women were treated. The treatment for women who were denied mentally insane was similar to the treatment of a criminal. In the 1800s, women who acted against what the man wanted was sentenced to their punishment in asylums. The root of the problem in Bly’s case was women had little voice, and once they were sentenced to the asylum, they lost their voice completely. Once Bly was admitted into the asylum, she quickly dropped her depiction of being insane. However, to her surprise, the more natural she acted, the more the doctors perceived her as being mentally ill. This shows, how
society viewed women with mental disabilities. According to Bly’s discovers, asylums, which were meant as a hospital for those with mental disabilities, became the case of mental disabilities. Psychcentral.com states, “No doubt many readers are familiar with the horrific treatment of patients in mental asylums. However, the first group of institutions was different. Not only did they have good intentions to help individuals with mental illness, they were also smaller and offered individualized care.” Not all asylums were fully bad. Some patients were very well taken care of and enjoyed their lives in the asylums. However, in the case of asylums the bad outweighs the good. Since men had the right to admit their wives without consent, it lead to the abuse and corruption in asylums. In Jeffrey L. Geller’s book, Women of the Asylum, the author speaks of different ways one could be admitted into a hospital. Geller writes,”Moral exciting causes represented the psychosocial end of the spectrum and included such factors as interpersonal and familial troubles, disappointments, poverty and destitution, bad treatment, and excessive intellectual work.” This quote is a direct reflection of how society viewed women and how asylums were used to suppress them even more. In the 1800s, women were not meant to be leaders or think for themselves. Anytime a woman broke of these rules places by men, they were diagnosed as mentally ill and taken to asylums to be “cured”. The asylums were a punishment for women if they tread to break suppression. In conclusion, asylums proved, through countless writings and photos, to cause more mental disabilities for women then cure them. Due to the restriction of women’s rights in the 1800s, placing women in asylums suppressed them even more, than helping.
During the 1960’s, America’s solution to the growing population of mentally ill citizens was to relocate these individuals into mental state institutions. While the thought of isolating mentally ill patients from the rest of society in order to focus on their treatment and rehabilitation sounded like a smart idea, the outcome only left patients more traumatized. These mental hospitals and state institutions were largely filled with corrupt, unknowledgeable, and abusive staff members in an unregulated environment. The story of Lucy Winer, a woman who personally endured these horrors during her time at Long Island’s Kings Park State Hospital, explores the terrific legacy of the mental state hospital system. Ultimately, Lucy’s documentary, Kings
In the Earley book, the author started to talk about the history of mental illness in prison. The mentally ill people were commonly kept in local jails, where they were treated worse than animals. State mental hospitals were typically overcrowded and underfunded. Doctors had very little oversight and often abused their authority. Dangerous experimental treatments were often tested on inmates.
The mentally ill was mistreated, beaten, thrown into unclean quarters, and even taken advantage of before the 1800's. They was viewed as helpless individuals. Society and the government viewed them as criminals and deemed them incurable. During the 1800's a pioneer named Dorothea Dix brought about a change dealing with the treatment of the mentally ill. She became the voice of them something they never had.
In their call to “bring back the asylum,” Sisti and his colleagues speak of the original, 19th-century meaning of the term asylum: a place that is a safe sanctuary, that provides long-term care for the mentally ill. “It is time to build them again,” they write.
In the 1800’s people with mental illnesses were frowned upon and weren't treated like human beings. Mental illnesses were claimed to be “demonic possessions” people with mental illnesses were thrown into jail cells, chained to their beds,used for entertainment and even killed. Some were even slaves, they were starved and forced to work in cold or extremely hot weather with chains on their feet. Until 1851, the first state mental hospital was built and there was only one physician on staff responsible for the medical, moral and physical treatment of each inmate. Who had said "Violent hands shall never be laid on a patient, under any provocation.
With this great power came great responsibility not to abuse it but it was indeed abused. Women at the time found themselves extremely vulnerable to being committed because the current medical opinion was that women were more likely to be insane than men. This was due to how a woman’s weak mind was plagued by her raging hormonal cycle. But this was not the only aspect of being a woman that made them vulnerable to accusations of false insanity and commitment to an asylum. The virtues of True Womanhood were being called into question. Packard was released from the Asylum by Dr. MacFarland for the reasons that she was unfixable in his eyes but an ulterior motive for Dr. MacFarland could have been that he did not want Packard’s strong will to bring her case in front of a judge. The possibility of her winning a hypothetical case could jeopardize his credibility and ruin his career. After her release her husband locked her up in a room with barred windows and no clothes or heat. Word got out through a letter that Packard slipped through the crack of her window to a fellow neighbor who went straight to a judge and the reverend was ordered to appear in court for ‘false imprisonment’. From there the case turned into a sanity trial because what was at question was the sanity of
In the 1840’s, the United States started to build public insane asylums instead of placing the insane in almshouses or jail. Before this, asylums were maintained mostly by religious factions whose main goal was to purify the patient (Hartford 1). By the 1870’s, the conditions of these public insane asylums were very unhealthy due to a lack of funding. The actions of Elizabeth J. Cochrane (pen name Nellie Bly), during her book “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” significantly heightened the conditions of these mental asylums during the late 1800s.
The Biography.com editors explain, “One of Bly’s earliest assignments at the paper was to author a piece detailing the experiences endured by patients. she pretended to be a mental patient in order to be committed to the facility, where she lived for ten days.” They describe her life while in the mental asylum. From the grueling conditions to the horrendous food, she risked it all for the greater good. In her book, Ten Days in a Mad House, Bly explains the various ways in which she was harmed (Bartle and Ockerldoom).
Sanity is subjective. Every individual is insane to another; however it is the people who possess the greatest self-restraint that prosper in acting “normal”. This is achieved by thrusting the title of insanity onto others who may be unlike oneself, although in reality, are simply non-conforming, as opposed to insane. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, this fine line between sanity and insanity is explored to great lengths. Through the unveiling of Susanna’s past, the reasoning behind her commitment to McLean Hospital for the mentally ill, and varying definitions of the diagnosis that Susanna received, it is evident that social non-conformity is often confused with insanity.
Mental illness has been around as long as people have been. However, the movement really started in the 19th century during industrialization. The Western countries saw an immense increase in the number and size of insane asylums, during what was known as “the great confinement” or the “asylum era” (Torrey, Stieber, Ezekiel, Wolfe, Sharfstein, Noble, Flynn Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill). Laws were starting to be made to pressure authorities to face the people who were deemed insane by family members and hospital administrators. Because of the overpopulation in the institutions, treatment became more impersonal and had a complex mix of mental and social-economic problems. During this time the term “psychiatry” was identified as the medical specialty for the people who had the job as asylum superintendents. These superintendents assumed managerial roles in asylums for people who were considered “alienated” from society; people with less serious conditions wer...
For many decades the mentally ill or insane have been hated, shunned, and discriminated against by the world. They have been thrown into cruel facilities, said to help cure their mental illnesses, where they were tortured, treated unfairly, and given belittling names such as retards, insane, demons, and psychos. However, reformers such as Dorothea Dix thought differently of these people and sought to help them instead. She saw the inhumanity in these facilities known as insane asylums or mental institutions, and showed the world the evil that wandered inside these asylums. Although movements have been made to improve conditions in insane asylums, and were said to help and treat the mentally ill, these brutally abusive places were full of disease and disorder, and were more like concentration camps similar to those in Europe during WWII than hospitals.
Another man involved was the Dr. John Galt he himself worked at one of these insane asylums as the superintendent of the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg. Although there was a stream of terrible abuse in the asylum and prison movement towards the sick and insane he was one of the few that treated his patients with care he had very little use for restraints and preferred a calming medication. He was also the first influence in
The BBC documentary, Mental: A History of the Madhouse, delves into Britain’s mental asylums and explores not only the life of the patients in these asylums, but also explains some of the treatments used on such patients (from the early 1950s to the late 1990s). The attitudes held against mental illness and those afflicted by it during the time were those of good intentions, although the vast majority of treatments and aid being carried out against the patients were anything but “good”. In 1948, mental health began to be included in the NHS (National Health Service) as an actual medical condition, this helped to bring mental disabilities under the umbrella of equality with all other medical conditions; however, asylums not only housed people
What comes to mind when you hear the words “insane asylum”? Do such terms as lunatic, crazy, scary, or even haunted come to mind? More than likely these are the terminology that most of us would use to describe our perception of insane asylums. However, those in history that had a heart’s desire to treat the mentally ill compassionately and humanely had a different viewpoint. Insane asylums were known for their horrendous treatment of the mentally ill, but the ultimate purpose in the reformation of insane asylums in the nineteenth century was to improve the treatment for the mentally ill by providing a humane and caring environment for them to reside.
The Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum, a sanatorium in which a melting pot of the state’s criminally insane, daft and demented were housed, was later effectively named the Dayton State Hospital, ultimately named 10 Wilmington Place, which completely “derails” past notions of the previous named building, and has now become a retirement home for the elderly. “It must be remembered that popular thinking at this time had by no means entirely removed from “insanity” its ancient association with demons, spirits sin and similar mythical phenomena. Neither was it generally considered in the category of illness and hence the afflicted were viewed with an admixture of curiosity, shame and guilt” (INSIDE D.S.H 2). The author is conveying that there was a misconception toward the afflicted that they were not only insane but also demonically possessed, hence the obscurity of the patients due to curiosity and shame by the community. In such films as House on Haunted Hill in which certain archaic medical experiments were performed on patients that once were housed there; as a challenge a group of people were offered money to spend the night in a house thought to be haunted by former patients years ago. This movie concept is in accordance with the author’s statement about popular thinking and public views.