Hows Your Head? By The Northern Rose

Psychiatric hospitals...

Mental hospitals...

Mental health units... 

Mental asylums...

Lunatic asylums...

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All English words. All met with negative connotations.

          While living in a country with a heated gun control debate we are met by several potential solutions. Some might work, but most just send us falling back through times and turn us into less understanding people. Although such institutions might help on a whole, they cannot and never will be the end all be all solution. Locking one away from civilization in an attempt to turn back the clock does not always work as well as we think it might. After all, we got rid of the Hitler and Stalin’s of the world for a reason.

          We are not too far removed from the past to realize that when we say someone has gone to a mental institution, we are saying that they are too bad to be a part of a mental institution. Also, when we drive past these places, we see cages and run down, despicable, buildings. First of all, it must be mentioned that a majority of our population is touched by some form of mental illness. Most of these people are not violent and definitely are not planning mass murders of as many people as possible. Some people might be better off in an institution but most will not be; and drawing a line between institutions and mass shootings is potentially dangerous. Dangerous enough to start another Salem Witch Trial happening.

          The language of current politics, coming from either side of the aisle, does not help people in these current situations. No one solution will be able to help the masses, which is why they say that team work works best. Nevertheless, mental hospitals started to disappear for a reason. Throughout history mental institutions were mostly used to hide those that people considered to be problems. Parents would drop off children that they did not want their neighbor to see (the BBC show Call the Midwife shows real examples of this). Others would be sent for committing minor infractions. Some had real problems, but these institutions were never a great solution.

          The real problem is that history repeats itself. Those who call for more mental institutions do not look at the reforms made since the shock treatment days on the 1960’s. They look at these times as the way they remember it being, as the way it should be. They want to back track, not move forward.

          Mental hospitals started out being referred to as lunatic hospitals. Institutionalization really came to be in the 19th century. It became part of a social process that believed that the best solutions for said “lunatics” was to create places for them outside of their families and local communities. There were a few mental institutions before this point. For instance, there was one in Williamsburg, Virginia. Back in the day it was called the Eastern State Hospital, the first mental institution founded on American soil. Today, its walls are still intact and give one an eerie and all together depressing vibe as they go through. If people cannot walk the halls today, can you imagine what it must have been like while it was still used for its original purpose. Not even the voice of James Earl Jones would calm a human walking through those halls today.

          When said hospital was still in use, the likes of Patrick Henry walked through those halls. His poor wife was mentally ill and slowly ceasing to be herself. He was said to be disheartened by what he seen and loved his wife too much to lock her away within its walls. Other wives and family members were not so lucky. People within these walls were always considered to be inmates.

          Many Americans may find this ironic but, thanks to King George III, the world learned that mental illness was indeed curable. The King suffered from a long mental illness but experienced remission in 1789. Finally, doctors began to notice. Although some started to call for humane treatment, on the whole this would never be humane by today’s standards. It all appeared to be nice and orderly on paper yet was not quite the same in practice.

          Institutionalization got worse in the lathe 19th and early 20th century. It appears that there was an increase of female inmates. This was not necessarily because they were mentally ill. “Between the years of 1800-1900, women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways the male society did not agree with” (E.P. Packard). This appeared to be an easy way to generate a submissive female. Also, if it did not work, they could simply leave them there (As seen on Call the Midwife).

          By 1904 the United States had 150,000 patients in mental institutions. The patient numbers were ever rising and, at this point in time, and doctors felt ever more pressure to find a solution. The average number of patients, in the United States alone, would jump 927%. Asylums were quickly turning into what one might call custodial institutions. To get into these facilities persons must be declared as insane, first by society and then by a doctor. Most were very normal people. There seems to be lots of proof of people seen as a source of embarrassment to their families were conveniently disposed of at said asylums.

     

  The 1900’s brought with it a great amount of experimental treatments, most notably of which is shock treatment. Shock treatment has more potential to harm a person’s mind than it does to help it. This type of shock treatment is now categorized as medical barbarism. Joined in that characterization was the ever-popular lobotomy. Developed in 1946, this treatment was decisively more harmful than it was good. With an icepick looking device a doctor would sever connections in the brains prefrontal cortex. By 1951, 18,608 lobotomies had been undergone in the United States alone. Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John and Robert, was rendered “profoundly intellectually disabled” as a result of this procedure.

          These are the procedures our politicians suggesting institutionalization remember. They may seem barbaric but they still survive, and there are some that see this kind of history as the path to a GREATER future.