The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, "a London citizen" is sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental illness for the past five hundred years-from the viewpoint of the patients themselves.Dale Peterson has compiled twenty-seven selections dating from 1436 through 1976. He prefaces each excerpt with biographical information about the writer. Peterson's running commentary explains the national differences in mental health care and the historical changes that have take place in symptoms and treatment. He traces the development of the private madhouse system in England and the state-run asylum system in the United States. Included is the first comprehensive bibliography of writings by the mentally ill.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIV. To the People of the State of Michigan: Come, let us reason together. Let us look at this asylum question in its true light. Let us who pay our money for the support of this institution demand that it be conducted on the same principle the law makes provision for. Our insane are taken to the asylum retreat to be cared for and benefited, and not to be injured. Our state law (referring to the asylum law) says, first, " Care shall be taken that no person be injured." (It matters not how violent a patient may be, they can be managed without injury.) Let us see to it that this law be observed. Second, " That every patient shall be seen, and notice taken of their condition, as often as once or twice a day, as the case may demand." Third, "That no person be received as a patient unless first examined by two physicians, and pronounced a fit subject for the asylum." And furthermore, " that no person be detained there who is not really insane." And another consideration, "There should be no ignorant or unprincipled attendants employed." I know for a positive fact that these laws were not regarded nor kept by those who had charge of this institution, and that the said superintendent, Dr. E. H. Vandusen, was not only guilty of gross neglect, but also of wilful and premeditated wrongs. The first lessons were not learned at Kalamazoo, as the Tyler case and others will show. I think it very important that there should be a law providing a fund of relief or compensation where attendants are injured by violent patients. There has been no such provision made as yet. Let this subject be considered. One attendant was seriously injured while I was there by being bitten by a patient. She was so much injured that she had to go to a great expense...

"Questions of Power: The Politics of Women's Madness Narratives explores the ways in which women have used autobiographical writing in response to psychiatric symptoms and treatment. By addressing health and healing from the patient's perspective, the study raises questions about psychiatric practice and mental health policy. The ultimate thesis is that autobiographies by women psychiatric patients can expose many of the problems in psychiatric treatment and indicate directions for change."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The mentally ill have always been with us, but once confined in institutions their treatment has not always been of much interest or concern. This work makes a case for why it should be. Using published reports, studies, and personal narratives of doctors and patients, this book reveals how therapeutics have always been embedded in their particular social and historical moment, and how they have linked extant medical knowledge, practitioner skill and the expectations of patients who experienced their own disorders in different ways. Asylum therapeutics during three centuries are detailed in encyclopedic entries, including "awakening" patients with firecrackers, easing brain congestion by bleeding, extracting teeth and excising parts of the colon, dousing with water, raising or lowering body temperature, shocking with electricity or toxins, and penetrating the brain with ice picks.

From Madness to Mental Health neither glorifies nor denigrates the contributions of psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychotherapy, but rather considers how mental disorders have historically challenged the ways in which human beings have understood and valued their bodies, minds, and souls. Greg Eghigian has compiled a unique anthology of readings, from ancient times to the present, that includes Hippocrates; Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, penned in the 1390s; Dorothea Dix; Aaron T. Beck; Carl Rogers; and others, culled from religious texts, clinical case studies, memoirs, academic lectures, hospital and government records, legal and medical treatises, and art collections. Incorporating historical experiences of medical practitioners and those deemed mentally ill, From Madness to Mental Health also includes an updated bibliography of first-person narratives on mental illness compiled by Gail A. Hornstein.