VICTORIAN MENTAL ASYLUMS

The mental asylum was the historical equivalent of the modern psychiatric hospital. The word asylum came from the earliest (religious) institutions, which provided asylum in the sense of refuge to the mentally ill.

Throughought history, expressions of insanity such as idiot, lunatic, and feeble-minded have emerged in the accounts of both women and men. Yet some historians debate women were particularly exposed to imprisonment — mainly when placed in the asylum by spouses or fathers. Origins of madness often varied between men and women.

For centuries, female hysteria was a common medical diagnosis, with women forced to undergo treatment simply for having shown signs of shortness of breath, fluid retention or even just ‘a tendency to cause trouble.’ Others were hospitalised for displaying ‘symptoms’, involving dizziness, anxiety, sexual desire, sleeplessness and irritability.

One of the oldest establishments was Bethlem, which opened in 1247 as part of the Priory of the New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem. The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is originated from the Bethlem Hospital’s name. The hospital became a contemporary psychiatric facility, but generally, it characterised the worst extremes of asylums in the age of lunacy reform.

Affluent Londoners could see the unfortunate inmates, laugh at them, abuse them, or watch them tortured. Outings to see them were so commonplace as not to need explanation. Before establishing lunatic asylums in the mid-19th century, people were dealt with locally under the poor law or criminal law. Though planned as a refuge for the sick, mental asylums operated more like a correctional institution than a treatment facility. This perhaps stemmed from the fact that not just the ill lived on the site. As prisons became congested, crooks often carried out their punishment in asylums, while others used the establishment as an abandoning ground for unwanted families.

The Victorian Era ushered in several significant changes regarding medicine and the treatment of the ill. Unfortunately, for many, asylums were prisons disguised as hospitals. It was an opportune way to eliminate the insignificant and incurable from society, and for those with wealth, private madhouses were handy dumping grounds for redundant wives.The keepers were little more than guards, and it was not uncommon for patients to be kept in chains or other restraints for most of the time. The extent to which they used restraints varied from one asylum to another, but they were accepted as a necessary part of mental healthcare.

The Lunacy Act largely drove the growth in the number of asylums. This act meant counties were legally obliged to provide asylum for people with mental deficiencies. Between the passing of the act in 1845 and 1890, over sixty asylums were built. They subsequently built a further forty. Eventually, asylum numbers reached a peak in the 1950s with over one hundred hospitals and approximately 150,000 patients in England and Wales.

In the past, the insane were told unclean spirits possessed them. To remedy it was then necessary to remove the offending spirit. Such beliefs had at least two unfortunate consequences. The first was that no advance was made in understanding mental illness. The second was that many thousands of men, women and children, already burdened with madness, were confined in chains and subjected to routine torture. The idea was by making the environment sufficiently uncomfortable, the torturers might induce the possessing spirit to leave its human host.

They endured dreadful torments. They were confined, manacled to a wall, whipped, starved, disrespected, tortured, submerged in iced water and otherwise maltreated. It also appears safe to accept that sexual abuse would have been common in view of twentieth-century revelations about church schools, poorhouses and state asylums.

The church often used mental asylums as prisons. Anyone the Church did not like or did not approve of could be imprisoned without trial in an asylum, and then tortured and abused at will. Victims ranged from critics of the Church, unmarried mothers and the genuinely insane.