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 mentally ill were treated very inhumanly in the early insane asylums. Some of the treatment the patients had to undergo was extremely painful and evil. The asylums were really prisons and not centers for treatment. The inmates were chained and the rooms were dark and filthy dungeons. The patients were treated like animals, not humans (Gray). Danvers, an insane asylum in Boston, Massachusetts was the rumored birthplace of the procedure known as lobotomy (Taylor). Dr. Walter Freeman studied lobotomy, and he was the first to practice the procedure. Lobotomy began with electric shock to the forehead. Then the eye lids were folded back and an ice pick was used to sever the frontal lobes. The patient would have black eyes after this awful procedure. This was supposed to cure an insane person (“YouTube”). Diane Gray made her views on early treatment in insane asylums clear: “Another early treatment was the branding of a patient's head with a red-hot iron to ‘bring the animal to his senses’. An English treatment of the earlier nineteenth century involved using a rotating device i... ... middle of paper ... ...othea Dix. Taylor, Jeremy. "The Most Famous and Notorious Insane Asylums in History - Asylum.com." Asylum | Men's Lifestyle | Humor, Weird News, Sex Tips, Fashion, Dating, Food and Gadgets. Web. 09 Apr. 2011. . This website was great. It had a lot of information on the insane asylums and how the people were treated. Viney, Wayne. "Dorothea Dix." Web. 12 Apr. 2011. . This site was very vital to my paper. It gave me a lot of information on Dorothea Dix. "YouTube - Lobotomy - PBS Documentary, on Walter Freeman." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 09 Apr. 2011. . This documentary was also quite useful. I only used it to learn about lobotomy, but it was easy to understand.
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
Lobotomies were traditionally used to remedy patients with psychological illnesses and behavioral disorders; in the 1950s, they were mainly phased out and substituted with medications, talk therapy, and other methods of dealing. As an overall decree, lobotomies are not carried out today, and many people reason that they are essentially quite brutal. When performed effectively, a lobotomy could bring about significant behavioral modifications for the patient. For psychotic patients, lobotomies were sometimes favorable, relaxing the patient so that he or she could live a somewhat average life. Lobotomies are also notorious for producing a lifeless affect and general reduced responsiveness; this was viewed as an advantage of the lobotomy over all by some supporters of the surgery. Nonetheless, lobotomies can in addition go very wrong. The brain is a tremendously elusive and very intricate organ, and in the era when lobotomies were performed, people were not familiar with much about the brain, as they did not have the assistance of a wide variety of scientific equipment to visualize the brain and its behaviors. At its worst, a lobotomy could be fatal, but it could also cause severe brain damage, ensuing in what was in essence mental retardation of the patient. Patients could also fall into comas and persistent vegetative states after lobotomies. The lobotomy is now thought
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.
One of the most famous forms of a cure during the 1930s was a surgery called Lobotomy. “Lobotomy, also known as leucotomy which mean cut/slice white in Greek, or its nickname of ice pick, is a neurosurgical operation that involves severing connection in the brain’s prefrontal lobe” according to Freeman. Lobotomy was performed by
The treatments at the hospitals that specialized in curing the insane were often done for the benefit of the staff, not the pat...
Noyes, Arthur P. M.D. and Kolb, Lawrence C. M.D. Shock and Other Physical Therapies. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Text and Criticism: The Viking Press. New York. 1973. Page 499.
" This improved the treatment of patients but the mentally ill that weren't in this asylum may have
“How Lobotomies Work.” HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks.com, 27 Oct. 2008. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.
Cohen, Jennie. "A Brief History of Bloodletting." History.com. 30 May 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2013. .
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 early history of mental illness is bleak. The belief that anyone with a mental illness was possessed by a demon or the family was being given a spiritual was the reason behind the horrific treatment of those with mental illness. These individuals were placed into institutions that were unhygienic and typically were kept in dark, cave like rooms away from people in the outside world. The institutions were not only dark and gross; they also used inhumane forms of treatment on their patients. Kimberly Leupo, discusses some of the practices that were used, these included may types of electro shocks, submitting patients to ice bath, as well as many other horrific events (Leupo). Lobotomies, which are surgical procedures that cut and scrape different connections in the brain, were very common practice. They were thought to help cure mental illness, but often ended up with more damage than good.
We all have our own perception of psychiatric hospitals. Some people may see them as a terrifying experience, and others may see them as a way to help people who cannot keep their disorders under control. David Rosenhan's perception led him to a variety of questions. How could psychiatric hospitals know if a patient was insane or not? What is like to be a patient there? According to Rosenhans study, psychiatric hospitals have no way of truly knowing what patients are insane or not; they quickly jump to labeling and depersonalizing their patients instead of spending time with them to observe their personality.
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 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.
Mental asylums have been contradicted over if they are good or bad for a person when their mind is sick. When someone has been born with a mental problem for example being bipolar or anxiety, seeing or experiencing a tragic thing for example like a death, or sometimes even being suicidal, their minds sometimes do crazy things because all they think about is what they saw or experienced or what they feel but they can’t control their emotions. So when their minds are doing crazy things they can’t think right so they do crazy things like killing themselves or just harming their themselves or even sometimes others, so it’s best to get professional help to help them with their problem, and some people think it’s better