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An essay on how was mental illness seen in the past
Treatment for mental illness 1950's
Critically discribe the history of mental illness focusing on exclusive following areas middle ages
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Alexandra Karpinski Mr. Griffith AP United States History 15 December 2017 During the Mental Illness Reform of the 1600s to 1877, people who had mental illness encountered various challenges that negatively affected their lives, which were caused by the shame of the ‘disease’. Those who were born with the now-know dyslexia, autism, and many more, were considered monsters and were hidden away from society. From the acts of neglect that were brought by the religious aspect of the church that caused lack of mental and social support by family and town members, those who were 'different' were destined to live the life of cruelty and abuse by being locked up and facing the barbaric and inhumane hospital treatments. While insanity was a growing topic in America, there were only two options for those opposed as threats: those who were considered “mad” were either locked up or hidden from society, and even those who stood out also were looked at more closely. In fact, the main idea on how America could possibly become a ‘perfect’ society included locking up the ones that truly needed help, because obviously their feelings aren’t valid. In order to obtain a good reputation, the main goal was to minimize the …show more content…
These people were forced to take part in exorcisms, were imprisoned, or executed. Later, asylums were built to house the mentally ill, but the patients received little to no treatment, and many of the methods used were cruel. Philippe Pinel and Dorothea Dix argued for more humane treatment of people with psychological disorders. In the mid-1960s, the deinstitutionalization movement gained support and asylums were closed, enabling people with mental illness to return home and receive treatment in their own communities. Some did go to their family homes, but many became homeless due to a lack of resources and support
The 1930s was a tough time for all of the mentally ill people. They were not treated the way that they do now. The mentally ill were called names like satans child, or they were not expected or very frowned upon in many religions. So because of all of the people who were mentally ill they started to create asylums. With these asylums they could hold almost all of the mentally ill people during that time. All of the asylums were overcrowded and sometimes there would be around 1 million patients. WIth all of the people in these asylums the staff and doctors became very understaffed so the patients living within the asylums were not treated how they should have been. Then doctors had found ways that they thought could cure these mentally ill people, whether it would be cruel to them or not. The treatments ran from major brain surgery to taking baths for multiple days.
Deinstitutionalization started off as something that may have seemed honorable and sensible to those in our society back in the 1900’s as it seems like it was started in the sole interest of those who were mentally ill. Some of the most common reasons as to why deinstitutionalization was started are because the government wanted to put to stop the unethical treatment of the mentally ill who were often packed int...
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.
“The Great Depression was a worldwide economic slump of the 1930’s” (Fetzer; p.338). The Great Depression caused a catastrophic amount of grief and distress for the citizens of the United States. Some of these citizens, however, faced more problems which caused grief and distress than others. Among those citizens were the mentally ill. During the era of the Great Depression, the mentally handicapped were treated unfairly in almost every aspect of their lives; this included how society treated them, how they were treated medically, and even how their personal lives were affected.
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 sickness of insanity stems from external forces and stimuli, ever-present in our world, weighing heavily on the psychological, neurological, and cognitive parts of our mind. It can drive one to madness through its relentless, biased, and poisoned view of the world, creating a dichotomy between what is real and imagined. It is a defense mechanism that allows one to suffer the harms of injustice, prejudice, and discrimination, all at the expense of one’s physical and mental faculties.
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...
...tally insane in jails and almshouses in Massachusetts. In 1843 she presents her findings to the Massachusetts Legislature and by 1860 twenty states would follow her advice for building new insane asylums and prisons. The institutional reform movement was successful in that twelve new prisons were built and punishments were less harsh than they had previously been but they were unsuccessful in improving the treatment of criminal and the mentally insane. Institutions turned into places of brutality and neglect. Penitentiaries made their prisoners perform labor, solitary confinement, and they were severely punished if they disobeyed. Institutional reforms improved the lot of the mentally ill only slightly which meant graduating from being chained in basements, beaten, starved and naked to being locked in a mental institution at the mercy of experimenting doctors.
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.
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
The growth of the number of mad houses during the nineteenth century is quite remarkable. Before 1810, only a few states had insane asylums. By 1850, most of the Northeastern and Midwestern states' legislatures supported having asylums. As early as 1860, 23 of the 33 existing states had some sort of public institution for the insane. (Perrucci, p.11)
n Milos Forman’s movie One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest demonstrates the inhumane mistreatment of patients within a psych ward. Nurse Ratched, a very controlling and power-hungry nurse has demoted all her patients to sheepish submissive beings. Randle McMurphy shows up and creates chaos in Nurse Ratched’s order. This causes Ratched to resort to the only solution she sees feasible, abuse and eventually lobotomization. As the film portrays, the mentally ill weren’t receiving proper treatment until mental illness was taken seriously by doctors and deinstitutionalization occurred. Unlike McMurphy’s treatment, deinstitutionalization in the 1960s impacted mental illness treatment positively and created a more societal acceptance of people with mental illness.
In 1821 Dix opened a charity school for young ladies at her grandparent’s home in Boston, but she had to give up her school because she began suffering from tuberculosis and she was also taking care of her sick grandmother. Dix vas ordered by her doctor to rest so, she took a trip to England were she stayed in Liverpool for eighteen months. She returned to the United States in January 1841 but still not well enough to teach. In March she agreed to teach a Sunday school class for women inmates of the House of Correction at East Cambridge. There, she saw how women were kept in filth, dark, damp, and cold, many of whom were mentally ill and retarded, not criminals. She was told that unlike human beings, the insane were not aware of cold or of their surroundings and there is no point in making life more comfortable for them since they would never recover or be cured. Dix spent the next eighteen months inspecting insane asylums, brothels, workhouses, and jails in Massachusetts and saw firsthand how the mentally ill were kept in cages and chains and also suffered sexual abuse by jailers. Aft...
Insanity. When some people think of the word “insanity”, television shows comparable to Law and Order and NCIS may come into mind. Due to some of these shows, one may not fully comprehend what is insanity. In this paper I will discuss what insanity, a brief history of insanity and how it impacts today’s society, furthermore, I will also discuss my personal thoughts on the subject.
Before the 1970’s, asylums for persons designated to be psychotic or otherwise severely mentally ill, called “institutions” were quite common. Most of such asylums were built to mimic Victorian mansions and contain hundreds of patients. It and many structures like it have come to be symbols of oppression, largely due to the literary work of Ken Kesey and the abuse scandals at the turn of the last century.