Characterize the institutional treatment of people with psychiatric illnesses in each of the following periods: (1) the late 1700s; (2) the early 1800s; (3) the late 1800s; (4) the 1950s

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In the late 1700s, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who is considered the father of American psychiatry, developed the "tranquilizing chair.". A patient was strapped into this chair and remained until he or she seemed calmed down. Dr. Rush believed that mental disorders were caused by too much blood in the brain. To cure this problem, he attempted to treat patients by withdrawing huge amounts of blood, as much as 6 quarts over a period of months. Dr. Rush also tried to cure patients with fright, such as putting them into coffins and convincing them they were about to die. Despite these strange and inhumane treatments, Dr. Rush encouraged his staff to treat patients with kindness and understanding.

In the 1800s, a Boston schoolteacher named Dorothea Dix began to visit the jails and poorhouses where most of the mental patients in the United States were kept. Dix publicized the terrible living conditions and the lack of reasonable treatment of mental patients. Her work was part of the reform movement that emphasized moral therapy. Moral therapy, which was popular in the early 1800s, was the belief that mental patients could be helped to function better by providing humane treatment in a relaxed and decent environment. During the reform movement, pleasant mental hospitals were built in rural settings so that moral therapy could be used to treat patients. However, these mental hospitals soon became overcrowded, the public lost interest, funds became tight, and treatment became scarce.

By the late 1800s, the belief that moral therapy would cure mental disorders was abandoned. Mental hospitals began to resemble human snake pits, in which hundreds of mental patients, in various states of dress or undress, milled about in a large room while acting out their symptoms with little or no supervision. Treatment went backward, and once again patients were put into straitjackets, handcuffs, and various restraining devices.

The wretched conditions and inhumane treatment of patients with serious mental disorders persisted until the early 1950s. By then, more than half a million patients were locked away. But in the mid-1950s, two events dramatically changed the treatment of mental patients: one was the discovery of antipsychotic drugs, and the other was the development of community mental health centers.