Photo by Simon Hurry
Before humane practice was the norm in asylums, it was hard to discern between medical treatments and torture procedures. Asylums were not good places to be.
Asylums were once the only institution that was deliberately set up to take care of people with mental illness. At least, that was what they were supposed to do; however, because of the lack of regulation and ethical mandates, the conditions in these institutions—and their subsequent treatment of patients—were often quite horrific. Medical malpractice in the early days of the asylum was frequent and wasn’t even considered malpractice! Before the restructuring of mental health care in the late 1900s, medical treatments and torture procedures might as well have been one and the same when it came to mental health care. Patients, who were often already abused at home or broadly by society, were subjected to intense physical and psychological abuse, and their human rights, especially patients who came from minority backgrounds, were denied daily.
This grotesque disregard for human life is what Patricia Lubeck explores in her non-fiction book: Asylum Scandals: Abuse, Torture, Corruption, and Murder in Minnesota’s State Hospitals.
Medical Malpractice
While the plague of medical malpractice in mental health institutions has greatly declined in recent decades—in due part because of activist groups lobbying for more human treatment and the discrediting of obsolete and inhumane practices—the legacy of the pain and the suffering caused by their adoption still haunts public memory. Countless numbers of patients suffered and died because of the neglect and the abuse—and if they were not driven to suicide, they would often go clinically insane or released only to become homeless or caught in an endless cycle because of re-institutionalization. Those who were subjected to the horrors of the asylum experienced great and often permanent trauma if they didn’t die; their testimonies are a sobering reminder of what the lack of ethical concerns can create, even when the intent is noble.
Luckily, modern mental health institutions are always reminded of the importance of consistently providing humane and effective care for their patients and continuously improving the way they go about doing their business to avoid severe medical malpractice.
The cornerstone of ethical mental health care is to strictly clamp down on physical and psychological abuse and to always maintain the dignity of patients and advocate for their fundamental human rights. No longer are mental health patients deprived of liberty, the right to privacy, and the freedom to treatment, unlike during the olden days were patients were constantly neglected and regarded with an almost inhuman indifference.
The horrific conditions that were inherent in the archaic and inhumane asylum system were the cause of enormous amounts of suffering and death. The history of the asylum is a dark chapter in the annals of mental health care, and it is critical that society remembers the horrors it caused to avoid regressing back to a time when institutions had so much callous disregard for the people under their care.
Procedures They Did in the Past
There were very horrific and terrible treatments used in asylums throughout history. Here are some of the more notorious ones:
- Patients were often restrained in straitjackets, handcuffs, and other devices that prevented them from exercising their movement. This would often be kept for the whole day, making it so that patients were effectively immobile.
- Patients were sometimes kept in small and narrow spaces for excruciatingly long periods of time. These experiences could lead to intense dehumanization and often madness.
- Patients were beaten or whipped as a form of punishment, especially if they were deemed too unruly by the doctors and the nurses. This was a great source of trauma for survivors, and the extensive use of it would often cause lasting injuries or death.
- Patients who couldn’t eat or refused to were subjected to a humiliating and dangerous procedure that involved being force-fed via tubes going up a patient’s nasal passages. This was an unsettling and invasive approach that made patients more vulnerable to respiratory illnesses.
The use and spread of these treatments were often based on outdated and unscientific ideas or unfounded “common-sense” assumptions of human psychology. What little good they did is entirely negligible because of the vast harm they caused.
