The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of the Asylum

http://www.vice.com/read/the-life-death-and-possible-resurrection-of-the-asylum



In 1841, a woman named Dorothea Dix walked into Massachusetts's East Cambridge Jail to teach Sunday school classes to the female inmates there and was horrified at what she found. Mixed in with the criminals were what she'd call "idiots and insane persons," who were being mistreated and left to rot in the cells of a prison that wasn't designed to hold them.

Though women couldn't vote or hold office back then, Dix began a political crusade on behalf of the mentally ill. She toured the state's prisons and almshouses (as poorhouses were called) and found example after example of disturbed people locked in cages, chained, beaten, kept in solitary confinement for years, or cruelly neglected by their keepers. In an almshouse in Newburyport, she found a woman who had been locked in a tiny cellar under the stairs and a man who lived next to a "dead room" where corpses were stored. She recounted all this in a "memorial" note she sent to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1843 that called for "an asylum for this class, the incurable, where conflicting duties shall not admit of such examples of privations and misery."

Dix was at the leading edge of the first wave of mental health reformers in the US, who demanded that people suffering from mental illness be treated more humanely and less like animals. In the second half of the 19th century, mental institutions, many of them inspired by the writings of Thomas Story Kirkbride, were constructed in hopes of providing a place of refuge for the mentally ill.

"There is abundant reason why every State should make ample provision, not only for the proper custody, but also for the most enlightened treatment of all the insane within its borders," Kirkbride wrote in his influential 1854 work On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane . "The simple claims of a common humanity... should induce each State to make a liberal provision for all its humanity."



Snip