For many years, those that are mentally ill have experienced mistreatment and discrimination. If you were experiencing mental illness during ancient times, you would be considered possessed by a demon, cursed by a witch, or it meant that you did something to anger the Gods and deserve to be punished. In other cases, you could be killed or imprisoned. The word “asylums” comes from the practice of “giving asylum”, which was originally a religious obligation or practice to help people in need and was commonly used in many religions. In earlier years the concept of asylums were often linked to holy places such as temples or churches that provided a sanctuary from manmade jurisdiction and for religious protection.

Everyone knows what an Insane Asylum is, but those that have had to experience being locked up in one, their only description they have for these “hospitals” is a living hell. Insane Asylums were marketed towards the wealthiest families as a place to send their mentally ill spouses, children, and parents to find support, unaware of the horrors in these places. Unfortunately, those that were admitted in asylum were not offered any treatment or therapy; they were treated like prisoners and some were chained or caged. Back then, the main goal of asylums was to remove the people who couldn’t take care of themselves from society and were subjected to extremely inhumane practices. 

Before mental asylums, people with mental illnesses or learning disabilities were in the care of their families for their entire lives, and those that did not have any family members to care for them often ended up living in the streets, begging for food and shelter. By the time the 1700s came up there was a small number of private mental institutions where only the wealthiest families could afford to send their mentally ill family members. 

The first public insane asylum was built in the United States in 1773, in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was named the Eastern State Hospital and is also called the Eastern Lunatic Asylum and was first proposed by Francis Fauquier, a Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1766. Francis’ main goal with this asylum was to help mentally disabled people. Eventually the 1800s rolled around and Victorian asylums arose. These asylums became known for their malpractice and abuse of their patients and started to be referred to as the snakepit. It was common practice for nurses and doctors to use physical restraints on patients and is rooted in the practice of early asylums. There were many justifications for this practice: restraints could control unacceptable behaviors such as tearing clothes and committing sexual acts, and prevent them from attempt suicide or hurting themselves. Many critics said that using restraints on patients simply for being uncooperative only increased the level of violence in asylums. In 1829, William Scrivinger was a patient at Lincoln Asylum in Chicago, Illinois and was found dead from strangulation caused by being chained to his bed and put in a straitjacket overnight without supervision. 

In 1887, a woman named Nellie Bly, who was 23 at the time and an investigative journalist, had herself committed into an asylum in Blackwell’s Island, New York under her new identity as Nellie Brown,, a Cuban immigrant suffering from amnesia for ten days so she could expose the horrible condition that patients were forced into. An editor named Joseph Pulitzer was meant to take the investigation but declined the story and challenged Nellie Bly to investigate the asylum. She feared she wouldn’t be a good enough actor to fool the authorities but was easily incarcerated. She rented a room in a boarding house and wandered the halls and street at night, refused to sleep, ranted and yelled random words, and practiced making herself look “crazed” in the mirror. The boarding house owners eventually called the police and were taken away.

 A judge sent Bly to Bellevue Hospital and saw how hospital inmates were forced to eat spoiled food and live in dysfunctional conditions. She was later diagnosed with dementia and sent to Blackwell asylum. Blackwell was originally meant to only house 1,000 patients, but when she got there she was crammed with more  than 1,600 patients. Budget cuts led to a decrease in health care for patients, most of the nurses, doctors, and other staff members had little to no training and compassion and consistently ordered harsh punishments. Patient were forced to take cold baths and put in wet clothes even during the winter months, they were tethered together with ropes and forced to pull heavy carts, the food was completely rotten, and patient were often threatened with sexual violence by staff members. These asylums that were meant to help people were full of so much psychological and physical abuse. Bly also discovered that most of the patients were not insane at all. They were mostly women, immigrants, people in poverty and were committed by others who found their presents as a nuisance.   

The New York World, the newspaper she worked for, sent an attorney to get her released, her book “10 Days In a Madhouse”, exposing the malpractice and poor treatment within asylums. The book sparked outrage throughout the  United States, pushing for change within the system. After Bly published her article, a grand-jury panel visited Blackwell asylum to perform an investigation, but the staff had been tipped off and cleaned up the place and released the patients that Bly had gotten her information from and denied all allegations of malpractice. The jury still sided with Bly and a bill that would increase funding for asylums and protect patient’s rights was passed. 

Unfortunately, not much changed even with new laws put in place. In the 1920s and 30s psychiatrists began to find ways to treat mental illness. Many treatment plans were made with the belief that mental illness had a physical basis in the nervous system and it popularized ECT, prefrontal lobotomy, and insulation-induced comas, that are still used today. Asylums that are now called psychiatric hospitals, have improved but still face problems. The biggest problem psychiatric hospitals face is lack of funding, which makes access a problem for many who need psychiatric care and causes patients to pay more.