The treatment of mentally ill people has evolved over time as the medical community had increased its understanding of the underlying causes of the disabilities. Asylums, places that housed the mentally ill in the 19th century, used harsh, painful, and inhumane methods to treat their patients. These methods of treatment began to change after Dorothea Dix, a teacher and nurse in the Civil War, began visiting asylums and reporting it to the public what she had witnessed. Dorothea Dix studied these patients and the treatments used on them for nearly her whole life, then helped a movement along to help asylums be better. Her criticisms of the asylum system would begin to change public opinion which was leading to laws being enacted to reform the…
During the Victorian Era, there was a change in the views towards mental illness as people began to realize the conditions and treatments towards patients of the mental institutions. Jane Eyre follows the story of a girl who is living through the social discriminations of the Victorian Era and observes the way the mentally ill were treated. In most cases, judging someone’s mental health was closely related to gender and where they stood on the social scale. Charlotte Bronte’s accurate yet insensitive portrayal of how mental illness was viewed in the Victorian Era is shown through the depiction of the character Bertha Mason in the novel Jane Eyre. Victorian Era mental patients were first treated with ignorance and anger.…
This has created new problems that have never happened before. In the late nineteenth century, Dorothea Dix and Reverend Louis Dwight had a campaign that got a lot of the mentally ill out of prison. Because of this campaign, there were mentally ill hospitals everywhere, and the numbers of confined people with mental illness sharply declined. However, there was a lot of abuse within mental institutions and a lot of involuntary imprisonment of people. When antipsychotic medications were established, it showed great promise; however, the drug was overused and this resulted in horrific treatment protocols.…
The development of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine in 1954 relieved a wide range of symptoms for innumerous mental patients across the country pushing the public to accept the potential and encourage the progress of the institutionalized Americans. The Mental Health Study Act of 1955 called for the “objective, thorough, nationwide analysis and reevaluation of the human and economic problem of mental health.” President Kennedy’s signing of the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act in 1963, which allowed the National Institute of Mental Health to create community-based mental health facilities, helped provide a course of prevention, early treatment, and ongoing care to mental health patients. It gave patients the option to be closer to their families and integrate into society. By 1977, only 650 of these community centers had been opened, serving some 1.9 million mentally ill Americans, or about half of the mentally ill population at the time.…
Now in the 21st century mentally ill people our more accepted in society. Help is more accessible for the people that really need it. There is a bad side to what is going on today, the asylums and prisons are still overcrowded it. In the past the main point of having people in prison was for people to have time to reevaluate themselves and then be released once again, now it seems like that is not even important for prisoners to become better…
Before the 19th century in the American society, criminals were executed, whipped, and held in dark cells. The insane wandered around the asylums and were not cared for properly. Reformers wanted to establish an official institution for the insane and criminals that was humane. They believed that reform and rehabilitation was possible in a controlled environment. As part of the humanitarian reforms sweeping through America, asylums and prisons were for criminals and the mentally ill.…
By 1820, it had already been recognized that mental illness was illness, not sin or depravity, therefore, many institutions across the world had begun to free the mentally ill from excessive restraints and had also begun to establish the concept of humane treatment in institutions devoted to their care. Dix, however, perfected the idea and the new model of care became known as the moral treatment. The moral treatment consisted of removing mentally ill persons from a stressful environment and family conflicts and placing them under a rather benign but autocratic system of organized living. There were regular hours of habits, and the patients were kept occupied with crafts such as gardening and more. Everything was under the close supervision of a superintendent, a physician, and his word was law.…
Techniques used on the mentally ill included insulin induced comas, lobotomies, malarial infections, and electroshock therapy (Dual Diagnosis). These types of treatment were effective for their time and some were cruel. “Some people didn 't seem to get better when they were under the guidance of the so-called talking cure,” (Dual Diagnosis). The talking cure involved communicating how the patient feels and has made its comeback in modern Psychology. “A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going to apply myself when I go back to school next September,” (Salinger 213).…
Introduction Schizophrenia comes from Greek origin and means, "split mind" (Coconcea, 2004). This is not to be confused that schizophrenia refers to a split-personality disorder. People with schizophrenia don’t have separate personalities. These are two extremely different disorders, yet many people have made this mistake in the Western culture. Another common assumption many people tend to make is that schizophrenics are violent and dangerous.…
Luckily in the 1840s a type of “reform” occurred where instead of physical abuse. They started to use more of a positive way of helping. Asylums needed to be reformed because of the mistreatment of paitents and the terrible living conditions that this abuse occurred in. The paitents in the asylums lived in terribly maintained rooms with rats and mice crawling over the floors near the tied up paitents.…
Nosocomephobia is the complete rational fear of mental hospitals. The word “asylum” has gained a lot of negative connotation since its first conception. The connotation refers to horrid, vivid images of the mentally ill being strapped down to a table and experimented on. If almost any sane person were to go through the humiliating, straining, disgusting events a psychiatric patient goes through on a daily basis, they would feel as though they deserved to be classified as insane. Mental correctional facilities need a reform of their procedures for correcting the mentally ill.…
The Yellow Wallpaper Synthesis Paper Introduction Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short novel, The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the literacies shows the feminist in nineteenth century. It contains woman’s depression and neurasthenia as a psychological illness and a patriarchal man and his attitude to his wife in 10-pages short story. The protagonist Jane and her husband move to a mansion and stay there for a while. Jane is suffering from a psychological illness, and her husband John advises her a rest cure other than practical treatments. However, there are some parts show John loves and cares about Jane, but he does not listen to her.…
Improvements at the hospital could be seen and in the 19th century the tours for the wealthy where no longer allowed to take place. The patients had also begun to receive better care but mental illness still wasn’t fully understood. The patients where no longer allowed to be chained up and in 1790 the straightjacket was then introduced. The straightjacket is supposed to be used for understaffed asylums to control patients but was never intended to be worn for long periods of time as it could cause blood clots with limbs being restricted. In the first half of the 1900’s when mental illness got the names Catatonia, Schizophrenia, Melancholia and Bipolar…
The barbaric treatments that people used on their patients has been replaced today by more humane treatments. There is no blistering or bleeding used in treatments for the mentally ill. Doctors today treat patients with more care and have more knowledge about their conditions. They do not harm their patients and instead use more mentally stimulating exercises to help them recover such as just talking or giving them puzzles and other brain exercises. They use medication in more severe cases of mental illnesses, but we now have more knowledge of the medicines that we use so they become more safe and help more.…
The study demonstrated the specific issue experienced by persons with severe mental illnesses, moreover, individuals who may fall into a self-perpetuating cycle of conflict to management substance abuse, violent behavior, and re offending. History Treatments in the 1800 's were not taken very seriously. Before hospitals were available, a person with mental illness was usually isolated from their families and had to stay home at all times. Those who had a family member with a metal illness denied their existence because the mentally ill were housed with criminals and were often physically abused. Mid 1800 's Mid 1800s was when the first few hospitals were built and were intended to house thousands of people.…