Sophia Wiest

Miss Burke

Honors English 11

5/12/17

Annotated Bibliography: Insane Asylum Treatments

Dain, Norman, PhD, Robert E. Drake, Allison M. Oerschner, Ken Kesey, and Eve Leeman. "A

Beautiful Mind: The History of the Treatment of Mental Illness." History Cooperative.

N.p., 21 Sept. 2016. Web. 21 May 2017.

http://historycooperative.org/a-beautiful-mind-the-history-of-the-treatment-of-mental-

illness/

In insane asylums there were many different treatments performed in them. People were

put into asylums to get better, and the result was they only got worse. In the history of

insane asylums they have changed dramatically throughout the years. Today, asylums

are no longer present, but some of the treatments still exist today. Asylums date back to

5000 B.C.E. with a treatment called trephination. This treatment came from ancient

world cultures, and was believed to release the supernatural or demonic evil inside of

you. They would drill or chip a hole inside the patients head so that the evil spirit was

released and the patient would be healed. Hippocrates studied the pathology of the brain

and the imbalances of the body. He discovered that there are four essential fluids in your

body that are essential. These four fluids are blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile,
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Hippocrates believed that these four fluids kept your body unbalanced. In order to keep

the body balanced techniques such as phlebotomies and purging were used to maintain

balance in the body. In China, they would hide the ill because they thought it was a

result of immortality. Many of the mentally ill were forced to live in confinement or they

were abandoned to live their lives on the streets. Rumors spread around the towns that

the mentally ill on the streets were dangerous people. Dr. Eve Leeman says that sex

affected the way that patients were treated, mostly women. Some women were given

treatments that were not necessary, but people saw women having a mental illness as

unladylike.

Freud, Sigmund. "History of Mental Health Treatment." Dual Diagnosis. N.p., 14 Mar. 2014.

Web. 17 May 2017.

http://www.dualdiagnosis.org/mental-health-and-addiction/history/

Started in the early 1840s people with mental illnesses were placed into hospitals called

insane asylums. These places were similar to jails, no windows and people could not

leave no matter how much they wanted to. In the 1840s a woman named Dorothea Dix

conducted research on these hospitals, and how brutal these places were and the

treatments that were performed in them. Dix spent years at insane asylums to interview

patients, she received striking results. Dix thought these treatments and living conditions

were unacceptable, she then pushed for proper health care for the mentally insane. Many

people thought that these facilities kept the mentally insane out of sane peoples lives. It
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was no longer a problem, and you hardly saw mentally insane on the streets, and slowly

people began to disappear. This changed later in the 1880s, because of a woman named

Nelly Bly. She was a strong woman who pretended to be mentally ill, but Bly was

assigned this task for a local newspaper. Bly documented everything that occurred in the

insane asylum, and was later turned into a book. In Blys book she described the

building itself, along with the treatments that occurred. She outline what it was like to

live in this facility, and concluded by saying how no one got better because of the

treatments performed. One of the treatments that Bly experienced was hair pulling out,

which is also called trichotillomania. Bly said, that the building was heavily watched by

security, and no one could get out of there unless the doors were unlocked. Bly said that

if isolating them was not successful and the treatments were not successful than the

doctors should have tried a different strategy.

Greenberg, Dan. "10 Mind-Boggling Psychiatric Treatments." Mental Floss. N.p., 07 Sept. 2012.

Web. 17 May 2017.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31489/10-mind-boggling-psychiatric-treatments

In insane asylums there were many different types of treatments to treat different mental

patients and their symptoms. One was called insulin-coma therapy, which first began in

1927. A physician named Manfred Sakel first came across this treatment my giving one

of his diabetic patients an insulin overdose and sent them into a coma. When his patient

woke up they claimed to be cured, 90% of his patients claimed to be cured after being
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treated. Another treatment called trepanation, or known as holes in your head. This

was a type of therapy used to get rid of anxiety in patients, by drilling a hole in their

heads. The doctors believed that drilling this hole in their heads would create a door for

demons to escape and relieve them of their pain. Trepanation is still in existence today,

you can have this treatment done to one today if one wishes. A third treatment called

hydrotherapy is a treatment when the doctors mummifies the patient with towels soaked

in cold water and completely submerges them into a bath for hours or days. The patients

were strapped down and were not allowed out unless they needed to use the bathroom.

Some of the patients were strapped to a wall and was blasted with water using a fire

hose. Hydrotherapy was replaced with psychiatric drugs, which was tended to be more

effective and pleasant. Another treatment that was performed in insane asylums was

seizure therapy, which was supposed to cure schizophrenia which was a rare in

epileptics. The doctors reason behind this therapy was when patients had seizures they

were happy after they had them. Doctors used seizure-inducing drugs to get the patients

to have seizures, so that after the seizure they were calmer and happier. People argued

that this method was highly dangerous and some doctors did not quite understand it. Still

to this day scientists do not understand why seizures help schizophrenic symptoms,

some believe because a chemical is release in your body when you have a seizure.

Trent, James W., Jr. "Education: Essay." Disability History Museum--Education: Essay:

Disability History Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 May 2017.

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Treatments have been around since the late eighteenth century during the Enlightenment

period. People with mental disabilities were considered insane, and were sent to asylums

where brutal treatments were performed on them. In countries such as France, England,

and the United States cared for the mentally insane more human and kinder than other

asylums. According to Philippe Pinel, a doctor in France said that the mentally insane do

not need chained up and beaten. Pinel called for kindness and patience while taking care

of these mentally insane patients. An English Quaker named William Tuke, chose to

reject traditional medical intervention. Tuke focused on getting the mentally insane more

engaged in reading, manual labor, and conversation. Tukes Retreat center remained

small so that the doctors could focus on patients individual needs. American Benjamin

Rush was a Philadelphia physician, and also one of the signers of the Declaration of

Independence. Rush believed that diseases could be treated in a hospital, in a setting that

was separate from modern life. After the death of Rush, Dorothea Dix began her start of

insane asylum treatments in 1841. Dix knew that insane asylums were suspicious places,

and investigated some of them. The concerns for the mentally ill were the changes in

philosophy for moral treatments. By the twentieth century the theories of Sigmund

Freud redirected the concerns of the people in charge of the insane asylums. The moral

treatments died out because of overcrowded hospitals, and treatments being unsuccessful

and to brutal for the patients.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway, 2017. Print.
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In the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Henrietta has six children. Her

second child Elsie was born with some kind of mental illness. Back then doctors did not

have the knowledge or the technology to properly diagnose Elsies illness. Today doctors

would have used epilepsy or mental retardation to describe Elsies illness, but back then

they did not know what to call her illness (Skloot 23). Later on before Henrietta dies she

sends her daughter Elsie to the Hospital for the Negro Insane, because they did not know

how to properly take care of her anymore. Later on in chapter thirty three, Deborah and

Skloot travel to the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Deborah wanted to see Elsies

medical records to try and receive more information about her. When they entered the

hospital and arrived at the desk the man explained how a lot of the patients files were

misplaced. Most likely people burned the files to hide what they were doing to the

patients. Surprisingly Elsies medical records were still there, and what surprised the

man the most was that there was a picture of Elsie in her files. The photo was a picture

of Elsie in distress, she did not look happy in the picture at all. Deborah looked past her

distress in the photo and noticed her beauty. I feel that both Deborah and Skloot were

wondering what were the doctors doing to her to make her look that way. In insane

asylums there were many different treatments and methods used, some were highly

dangerous. Some of these methods and treatments did not even heal the patients but only

made them worse. In the novel Elsies records did not give a clear understanding of how

she died or what from. From the research that was formed together, there were many

treatments that could have been performed on Elsie for her symptoms.