Mental Institutions in America

Social Policy to 1875

Robert Golembiewski, Gerald N. Grob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138527980
• eBook ISBN: 9781351505710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 examines how American society responded to complex problems arising out of mental illness in the nineteenth century. All societies have had to confront sickness, disease, and dependency, and have developed their own ways of dealing with these phenomena. The mental hospital became the characteristic institution charged with the responsibility of providing care and treatment for individuals seemingly incapable of caring for themselves during protracted periods of incapacitation.The services rendered by the hospital were of benefit not merely to the afflicted individual but to the community. Such an institution embodied a series of moral imperatives by providing humane and scientific treatment of disabled individuals, many of whose families were unable to care for them at home or to pay the high costs of private institutional care. Yet the mental hospital has always been more than simply an institution that offered care and treatment for the sick and disabled. Its structure and functions have usually been linked with a variety of external economic, political, social, and intellectual forces, if only because the way in which a society handled problems of disease and dependency was partly governed by its social structure and values.The definition of disease, the criteria for institutionalization, the financial and administrative structures governing hospitals, the nature of the decision-making process, differential care and treatment of various socio-economic groups were issues that transcended strictly medical and scientific considerations. Mental Institutions in America attempts to interpret the mental hospital as a social as well as a medical institution and to illuminate the evolution of policy toward dependent groups such as the mentally ill. This classic text brilliantly studies the past in depth and on its own terms.

Index

Admissions. see Mental hospitals,; admissions

Aged, 3, 131, 188, 341

Alabama, 366, 367, 374

Alabama Insane Hospital, 142–143,367, 374

Alcoholism, 90, 189, 351

Alienists, 143, 166

Almshouse movement, 13, 93

Almshouse(s), 94, 110

admission policies, 13, 16

care in, 22

in Massachusetts, 93, 308–309

mentally ill in, 257, 263

in New York City, 29, 244, 262

in Philadelphia, 124–125

America, 2–3, 290–291

attitudes toward immigrants in, 233–234

medicine in, 153–154

nineteenth-century institutions in, 77

psychiatric thought in, 1, 151–158

Second Great Awakening in, 48–50

American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 245–247

American Journal of Insanity, 137—140 passim, 147, 205n, 206n, 299, 310, 321, 326, 362

American Medical Association, 147, 149, 308, 315

American Psychiatric Association, 135

American Revolution, 28

Americans, and mental illness, 325, 341–342

American Social Science Association, 281

American Statistical Association, 163

Anglo-Saxon race, and mental illness, 158

Annual reports, 163, 307n, 346

from early hospitals, 96

state boards of charity, 284–286

Woodward’s, 101

Appleton family bequests, McLean, 70

Architecture, hospital. see Mental hospitals,

architecture of Association of Medical Superintendents of

American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), 103, 135, 139,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• I. The Mentally III in Colonial America
• II. Philanthropy and Hospitals
• III. The Growth of Public Mental Hospitals
• IV. American Psychiatry: Origins of a Profession
• V. The Mental Hospital 1830-1875: Dilemmas of Growth
• VI. Class, Ethnicity, and Race in Mental Hospitals
• VII. Centralization and Rationalization: The Evolution of Public Policy, 1850-1875
• VIII. The Search for Alternatives
• Appendix I. The Founding of State Mental Hospitals to 1860
• Appendix II. Average Annual Admissions to the American Mental Hospital, 1820-1870
• Appendix III. Average Total Number of Patients Treated in the American Mental Hospital, 1820-1870
• Appendix IV. Selected Statistics for American Mental Hospitals, 1820-1875, at Five Year Intervals (Admissions, Total Number of Patients, Average Patient Population, Recoveries, Deaths)
• Bibliography
• Index