From Care to Cruelty: When Psychiatrists Are Put in Charge

     By 1800 the growth of American cities had fostered a small segment of the newly urban population who were mentally or emotionally distressed. The only repositories for them at the time were in the shackles of prisons designed to punish criminals. Those quarters were filthy, the food was scarce, and the mentally disturbed endured verbal humiliation and physical punishment of ice baths, bloodletting and continual restraints.

     After the turn of the century humanitarian philanthropists began funding new “moral therapy” asylums that treated the mentally ill with kindness, structured routines, productive and meaningful work, and fresh air recreation and leisure periods. Prominent architects designed aesthetic buildings within landscaped grounds as part of this humane, Quaker based treatment.

     Recovery rates soared at retreats like McLean, started by Reverend John Bartlett just outside of Boston, because of the individual attention and beneficent treatment the residents received.

     With the rapid growth of America’s urban population in the burgeoning industrial age as agricultural refugees sought work in factories, more of the population suffered from mental health issues. The humane Quaker system was unprepared.

     Asylums soon became human warehouses for “the insane.” The government decided in the mid-1800s to put psychiatrists in charge of a now increasingly sordid and deteriorating system.

     By the end of the century psychiatrists had developed their theories of genetic and biological causes of mental illness, and their overcrowded institutions became cruel laboratories for insulin coma therapy, lobotomies and electroshock treatments. The inhabitants of these dark, repressive institutions were not publicly visible enough to require any voluntary consent for these brutal experiments, and psychiatry had a field day of human experimentation.

     Today the McLean campus still sits just outside Boston, its grounds looking nearly as pastoral as their earliest days when designed by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

     However, that calm, polished exterior of its buildings today hides the brutality of the 10,000 electroshock sessions that are given to its residents every year, courtesy of its staff psychiatrists. Rather than the original successful rehabilitation of its residents through moral therapy, today’s Mclean “graduates” include poets like Sylvia Plath, whose suicide occurred after her many insulin and electric shock treatments there.

     That’s a different kind of psychiatric “moral therapy” altogether.