A Brief History of Early Mental Hospitals

Mental illness has always been a part of this world but it has been handled in many different ways depending on the time period. Before the mid to late 1700’s, mental illness was thought to be a lack of morals or spirituality, which resulted in punishment to the ill person and often their family as well. Mostly all mentally ill people were cared for by their families, but in severe cases, they were sent to stay in jails or almshouses (a house endowed by private charity for the reception and support of the aged or infirm poor; a poorhouse). When jails became overcrowded with the ill patients they had to find other resources to take in the abundance of people, leading to the building of mental hospitals.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the first real organized attempt to care for the mentally ill was in 1752 by the Quakers in Philadelphia. In this attempt they opened the Pennsylvania Hospital which had rooms in the basement, with shackles attached to the walls for the new admits. After a couple years there were so many people trying to get admitted, they decided to build an extra building on the side of the hospital known as, Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. This new hospital stayed in operation until 1998 under numerous different names.

In 1817 a hospital opened in Philadelphia with possibly one of the longest names; The Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason. This facility was also opened by the Quakers and was a private mental hospital. It is still opened to this day for the same reason of helping the mentally ill, but under the name Friends Hospital.

By 1890 all 50 states had at least one publicly supported mental hospital if not more. At this point in time, the hospitals housed over 500,000 patients. Around this time new treatments were being discovered and readily available.

Before humane treatments started becoming available, patients were having to suffer through “treatments” that were really torture. Some of the most common treatments used in the early days were restraints, lobotomies, strong drugs, plunge baths, “shock” water treatments, bleeding, purging, gyrating chairs, and a machine used to swing patients around in the air. All these treatments were supposed to help “cure” the patients. Restraints are pretty common even to these days but widely vary in comfort compared to the old restraints. Cold, grimy, heavy metal shackles were used in the early days around wrists and ankles almost 24/7 only allowing enough movement to feed oneself. Today there are severe regulations on restraints including, they must be taken off every two hours for at least a half hour to check for skin break down; and they are no longer heavy metal chains. Plunge baths were frequently used to “shock” the patients into being cured. They were basically immersed in a large bathtub of ice cold water for long periods of time. Purging was the use of laxatives. One of the most common methods used was electroshock therapy. This therapy method was used to induce patients into seizures to put their symptoms into remission.