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History of Mental Illness & Control of Women

that it became common to create institutions to house the ômad,ö at first more to protect society from them than to protect, treat, or cure them. (This seems to have been the primary function of Bethlem Hospital, from which the term ôbedlamö is derived, which had been founded in 1247.)

Yet at the time the creating of public asylums was a great step forward from a humanitarian point of view. Before then, the mentally ill had simply been imprisoned (Rothman, xxiv). The creation of the asylum arose out of the perception that, whatever else might be true, the mentally ill were not merely criminals, largely because they were unable to make moral choices between right and wrong; that is, they were not choosing deliberately to break the law. If they had descended to the moral level of beastsùand thus they were commonly regardedùit made no more sense to punish them than it would to punish a dog or horse for stealing food.

It was only gradually that theories evolved about the causes of mental illness that could be translated into procedures for attempting to treat or cure the mental illness. At first the institutions were well-regimented. The theory in prison and asylum alike was that training in a disciplined life could transform the character of both the criminal and the insane. However, by the 1880s, asylums in America had become corrupt, degenerated, overcrowded, and brutal (Rothman, xxv-xxvi). It took decades to turn this situation around. In the 1920s conditions such as were depicted in the famous film The Snake Pit were commonplace.

By the 1880s such psychiatrists and psychologists as Charcot, Sigmund Freud, and William James were casting light into the depths of the mind, and beginning to find ways to treat some kinds of mental illness on a conceptual level. FreudÆs ôtalking cureö seemed particularly revolutionaryùwhen it worked. However, it did not come into common usage until after World War I, when it wa...

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History of Mental Illness & Control of Women. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:40, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711818.html