Insane Asylums In The 1800s

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One can find out if Insane Asylums helped or hurt mental illnesses through the patient’s illnesses, the practices, and the experienced outcomes. Ever since the first insane asylums in the 1800’s, a huge problem was how incredibly easy it was for someone to be deemed insane and admitted. Photograph Reasons for Admission (Reasons) lists laziness, mental excitement, novel reading, asthma, and grief as a few of many absurd reasons that an individual would be ruled mentally ill and then immediately placed into an asylum to be treated and hopefully cured. It seems as if anything someone did or anyway someone felt could be twisted into complete insanity in the 1800’s, before doctors and everyday people learned about medicine. Referring back to photograph, …show more content…
Alex Wain, a curator for the website SoGoodSoBad, talking about the surgeries that are performed in insane asylums said, “Yet in an era where modern medicine was still developing, everything it seemed could be cured with a stint in the local mental asylum where you could potentially undergo all manner of nasty, untested, unregulated and invasive surgeries. In some institutions for the criminally insane, electro shock therapy use to be commonplace - a way of 'resetting ' / frying the human brain.” The main surgery here is Electro-Shock Therapy, which essentially just give the patient several electric pulses to the head, which, as Alex Wain said, they thought would shock and reset the brain. However, the outcome of this therapy was the frying of the brain thus rendering them either dead, brain dead, or in zombie-like mental …show more content…
Hill and Laugharne recorded all of an asylum’s patient’s medical records, and made a chart of the outcomes. According to Hill and Laugharne, the positive results were that, “57.5% of those diagnosed with Mania, dementia or melancholia were recovered and discharged in less than or at a year.” However, the negative results were that, “34% of patients died within the first year.” In conclusion, insane asylums were both horrible and fantastic. The outlook depends on what aspect one is judging from, if judging from modern medicine, then asylums were necessary for medicine to be as advanced as it is today. But, if judging from the treatment of the patients then the asylums appear to be horrific and

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