Mental Illness In The 19th Century Essay

Treatment of mental illness has been changed and discussed about through centuries. Mental illness was given more attention to around the beginning of the 19th century. Treatment of the mentally ill was hugely changed in the 19th and 20th century and treatment saw many improvements during this time. The way the mentally ill were treated improved the increased establishment of professional asylums for them and how they were recognized. Before the French Enlightenment and the 20th century, mental illness treatment was poor and not noticed. The mentally ill were kept in different houses and private establishments. Asylums for the mentally ill before the 19th century often mistreated the patients and the mentally ill were thought to be incurable. The industrial revolution and a mass influx of immigrants into the Unite States started around the turn of the 19th century. “These changes caused problematic dislocations in the American social landscape and a rise in the rates of madness” (Mental Illness). A major increase in population with these immigrants linked to the belief more mentally ill people were in the United States. To cope with new change, mentally ill people were being put into,

One key person in the advances made for treatment of the mentally ill was a French physician Philippe Pinel. He stated that mental illness was curable and that the mentally ill did not have to be put in shackles and that they could be cared for with Traitement moral, known as moral treatment. His ideas were put into the new asylums. “The basic structure of nineteenth-century asylums was modeled after the family unit” (Deviancy to Mental Illness: Nineteenth-Century Developments in the Care of the Mentally Ill). Mentally ill people in these new asylums were treated as if they were children. They had caretakers who acted as their guardians and they gave the inmates work and chores to