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history of the insane asylum
history of the insane asylum
history of the insane asylum
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The Tales of Mental Asylums in Pennsylvania
Once upon a time, long ago in the mists of time, sprawling brick structures housed countless individuals with mental disturbances. These massive structures were known to the world as mental asylums for the insane. In reality, the majorities of these individuals were not insane, but in contrast were suffering from mild mental problems such as depression or anxiety. These people were looked down upon in society and were labeled as "freaks" or "batty" because of their mental disorder. In the early twentieth century, mental issues were considered taboo. If a family had a sibling or relative who was suffering from a mental disorder, they were swept under a rug; to be taken care of at another time. These days, these immense structures are an object of the past, a bygone era. Many asylums still stand tall as monuments to the world of health care, while many do not stand at all.
Two hundred years ago, Pennsylvania revolutionized the mental health care movement. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor made a suggestion to his fellow colleagues about individuals suffering from mental disorders. Instead of treating individuals with mental disorders as a sign of demon possession or confused soul, treat their disorder as an illness. In the late 1800's, another Philadelphia doctor caught wind of Rush's idea to treat mental illness. Thomas Kirkbride believed the insane, as they were called in nineteeth century, deserved humane treatment. After this realization, the asylum movement took place in Pennsylvania. Individuals suffering from mental disorders were taken out of their inhumane circumstances an...
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Beam, Alex. Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital. New York: Public Affairs, 2001.
Highlights the existence of McLean Hospital. From its founding in 1817 throught today. Based on original research. Housed many troubled geniuses of our time. Poets, writers, and actors. Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor.
Berger, Lisa and Alexander Vuckovic. Under Observation: Life Inside a Psychiatric Hospital. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1994.
Describes life within a psychiatric hospital. Fascinating account of diagnosis and treatment with facility. Portrait of the inner workings of the psyche. Treatment controversies and economic pressures.
Dowdall, George. The Eclipse of the State Mental Hospital: Policy, Stigma, and Organization. New York: University Press, 1996.
Modern psychiatric hospitals evolved from, and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylums. The treatment of inmates in early lunatic asylums was sometimes brutal and focused on containment and restraint with successive waves of reform, and the introduction of effective evidence-based treatments, modern psychiatric hospitals provide a primary emphasis on treatment, and attempt where possible to help patients control their own lives in the outside world, with the use of a combination of psychiatric drugs and
The fight for improved health care for those with mental illness has been an ongoing and important struggle for advocates in the United States who are aware of the difficulties faced by the mentally ill and those who take care of them. People unfortunate enough to be inflicted with the burden of having a severe mental illness experience dramatic changes in their behavior and go through psychotic episodes severe enough to the point where they are a burden to not only themselves but also to people in their society. Mental institutions are equipped to provide specialized treatment and rehabilitative services to severely mentally ill patients, with the help of these institutions the mentally ill are able to get the care needed for them to control their illness and be rehabilitated to the point where they can become a functional part of our society. Deinstitutionalization has led to the closing down and reduction of mental institutions, which means the thousands of patients who relied on these mental institutions have now been thrown out into society on their own without any support system to help them treat their mental illness. Years after the beginning of deinstitutionalization and after observing the numerous effects of deinstitutionalization it has become very obvious as to why our nation needs to be re-institutionalized.
As medical advances are being made, it makes the treating of diseases easier and easier. Mental hospitals have changed the way the treat a patient’s illness considerably compared to the hospital described in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Before Kirkbride's standardized methods for mental hospitals, those with mental illness suffered crude and inhuman treatment. Beginning in Colonial America society, people suffering from mental illness were referred to as lunatics. Colonists viewed lunatics as being possessed by the devil, and usually were removed from societ...
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.
There were patients who had chronic illnesses and were subdued by restraints and sedation up to 1950s. Moving forward towards the 60’s, the criteria of hospitalization started to change when questions on how well asylums worked and the ethical problems with patient care was raised (West, 2010). Due to the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 these institutions started to close all around the states and shifted away from rural to urban areas. Psychiatric hospitalization had a new criterion stating that an individual had to pose a threat to themselves or others and or show evidence of severe psychiatric illness that renders him or her gravely disabled (Caple,
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.
Continuing budget cuts on mental health care create negative and detrimental impacts on society due to increased improper care for mentally ill, public violence, and overcrowding in jails and emergency rooms. Origins, of mental health as people know it today, began in 1908. The movement initiated was known as “mental hygiene”, which was defined as referring to all things preserving mental health, including maintaining harmonious relation with others, and to participate in constructive changes in one’s social and physical environment (Bertolote 1). As a result of the current spending cuts approaching mental health care, proper treatment has declined drastically. The expanse of improper care to mentally ill peoples has elevated harmful threats of heightened public violence to society.
Asylum: A History of the Mental Institution in America. Dir. Sarah Mondale. Stone Lantern Films, Inc. 1988. Film.
The human brain is a vast, unexplainable, and unpredictable organ. This is the way that many modern physicians view the mind. Imagine what physicians three hundred years ago understood about the way their patients thought. The treatment of the mentally ill in the eighteenth century was appalling. The understanding of mental illness was very small, but the animalistic treatment of patients was disgusting. William Hogarth depicts Bethlam, the largest mental illness hospital in Britain, in his 1733 painting The Madhouse1. The public’s view of mental illness was very poor and many people underestimated how mentally ill some patients were. The public and the doctors’ view on insanity was changing constantly, making it difficult to treat those who were hospitalized2. “Madhouses” became a dumping ground for people in society that could not be handled by the criminal justice system. People who refused to work, single mothers, and children who refused to follow orders were being sent to mental illness hospitals3. A lack of understanding was the main reason for the ineptness of the health system to deal with the mentally ill, but the treatment of the patients was cruel and inhumane. The British’s handling of mentally ill patients was in disarray.
As a result of the lack of regulation in state mental institutions, most patients were not just abused and harassed, but also did not experience the treatment they came to these places for. While the maltreatment of patients did end with the downsizing and closing of these institutions in the 1970’s, the mental health care system in America merely shifted from patients being locked up in mental institutions to patients being locked up in actual prisons. The funds that were supposed to be saved from closing these mental institutions was never really pumped back into treating the mentally ill community. As a result, many mentally ill people were rushed out of mental institutions and exposed back into the real world with no help where they ended up either homeless, dead, or in trouble with the law. Judges even today are still forced to sentence those in the latter category to prison since there are few better options for mentally ill individuals to receive the treatment they need. The fact that America, even today, has not found a proper answer to treat the mentally ill really speaks about the flaws in our
The Mental Health Revolution is a progression of laws going into effect that are slowly changing the way that mental health patients are seen and treated. Nellie Bly, an early muckraker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an incredibly important influence on the beginning of that revolution. She did this by spotlighting Blackwell’s Island, an asylum for the poor in New York, for its awful conditions and abuse towards the patients living there. In addition, Nellie was one of the first influential women journalists, from which she exposed many other horrors and gave substance to the early feminist movement. By exposing the mistreatment of mental health patients at Blackwell’s Island, Nellie Bly began the mental health reform
In today’s society, the stigma around mental health has caused many people to fear seeking medical treatment for problems they are dealing with. With an abundance of hateful outlooks and stereotypical labels such as: crazy, psycho, and dangerous, it is clear that people with a mental illness have a genuine reason to avoid pursuing medical treatments. Along with mental health stigma, psychiatric facilities that patients with a mental health issue attend in order to receive treatment obtain an excessive amount of unfavorable stereotypes.
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
Those with mental illness would live in the community with an array of services and be able to be free from the constraints of confinement. In the early 1960’s the United States began an initiative to reduce and close publicly-operated mental hospitals. This became known as deinstitutionalization. The goal of deinstitutionalization was to allow people suffering from mental illness to live more independently in the community with treatments provided through community health programs. Unfortunately, the federal government did not provide sufficient ongoing funding for the programs to meet the growing demand. States reduced their budgets for mental hospitals but failed to increase funding for on-going community-based mental health programs. As a result of deinstitutionalization hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people were released into the community without the proper resources they needed for their treatment. (Harcourt,