History
Modern psychiatric hospitals evolved from, and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylums. The development of the modern psychiatric hospital is also the story of the rise of organised, institutional psychiatry. While there were earlier institutions that housed the "insane" the arrival of institutionalisation as a solution to the problem of madness was very much an event of the nineteenth century. To illustrate this with one regional example, in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were, perhaps, a few thousand "lunatics" housed in a variety of disparate institutions but by 1900 that figure had grown to about 100,000. That this growth coincided with the growth of alienism, later known as psychiatry, as a medical specialism is not coincidental.
The treatment of inmates in early lunatic asylums was sometimes brutal and focused on containment and restraint. With successive waves of reform, and the introduction of effective evidence-based treatments, modern psychiatric hospitals provide a primary emphasis on treatment, and attempt where possible to help patients control their own lives in the outside world, with the use of a combination of psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy. These treatments can be involuntary. Involuntary treatments are among the many psychiatric practices which are questioned by the Anti-Psychiatric movement. Involuntary treatment is emphatically opposed by the mental patient liberation movement, but this movement does not have any issue with any psychiatric treatment that is consensual, provided that both parties are free to withdraw consent at any time.
Most psychiatric hospitals now restrict internet access and any device that can take photos.
Read more about this topic: Psychiatric Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)