Does Living In The Urban Environment Causes Mental Illness

23 Pages 5731 Words

gland, citizens visited Bedlam hospital, where a circus atmosphere surrounded the exhibition and exploitation of the "lunatics," who, like wild animals, were put on display in their cages for the townspeople's amusement. In colonial America, mentally ill persons wandered the outskirts of towns, living in the woods and in caves, much as many of the homeless mentally ill do today.
Dorothea Dix, a visionary reformer in nineteenth-century America, challenged civic leaders to establish asylums or sanctuaries in rural areas where ill persons could receive food, shelter, and humane treatment. Fresh air, farm-grown food. and a pastoral setting were seen as healing and nurturing for severely troubled persons. Self-contained communities sprang up in every state in the Union, with populations varying from several hundred to ten thousand patients. Most of the administrators of these massive asylums were medical doctors who attempted to follow Dix's vision. Responsibility for the care of persons with serious and persistent mental illnesses was seen as belonging to the state government and was supported by appropriations of public tax funds (Carey 21-25).
Unfortunately, the states' acceptance of responsibility for decent standards of care for mentally ill persons began to founder. Eugenic sterilization of the "feeble minded" was legal and in practice in many regions of the United States. Persons were warehoused for years in custodial care under primitive conditions. Abuse and neglect were rampant. Corruption, combined with the indifference of political leaders, led to a situation that was desperately in need of reform (Carey 28).
In the 1940s, the large state hospitals had decaying physical plants, were inadequately staffed by professionals, and were administratively and geographically isolated from oversight by the nearby communities. The average citizen operated on the premises that "out of sight was out of mind" and "out of mind should be out o...