Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The lunatic asylum, insane asylum or mental asylum was an institution where people with mental illness were confined. It was an early precursor of the modern psychiatric hospital. Modern psychiatric hospitals evolved from and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylum.
From the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum to the English institution that inspired the word "bedlam," explore the dark history of insane asylums. Insane asylums have a long, unsavory history — but they weren’t originally intended as sites of horror.
But the ruins of some abandoned asylums still stand. Here are 18 places where you can explore the ghosts of psychiatric history.
It’s easy to think that if people with mental illness could be housed and treated in asylums or similar institutions, they wouldn’t be policed and incarcerated at such high rates.
The asylums of earlier days became popularly known as the snake pits of the 1940s and 1950s and abandoned shells in our lifetimes. How did this happen? In numerous public institutions, especially in the 1950s, the sleeping arrangements for patients with mental illness or mental retardation lacked any semblance of privacy or dignity.
There was a movement to make the treatment of mental illness more humane during the 1700s and 1800s, but what did day-to-day life actually look like in the insane asylums of 1854?
This Review seeks to nuance the standard narrative of asylums by considering the voices and views of those who were in them at different historical timepoints.
Asylums have not been replaced by adequate regional secure units and access to minimally secure hospitals, leaving penitentiaries with much higher rates of mental disorder than the general population.
By being innovative, however it is possible to paint a picture of what it was like to be in an insane asylum. Capturing the perspective of patients is crucial if we want to understand what...
The closing decades of the 19th century saw another shift in the care of mentally ill people: In response to the deteriorating conditions of the public hospitals, a number of physicians opened small, private asylums in their own homes for psychiatric patients.