Journalist Nellie Bly captured the asylum atmosphere firsthand when she went undercover at the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum in New York in 1887. “The mentally ill were considered social deviants or moral misfits suffering divine punishment for some inexcusable transgression.”
Lieberman in Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry. “The purpose of the earliest mental institutions was neither treatment nor cure, but rather the enforced segregation of inmates from society,” writes Jeffrey A. This is when asylums themselves became notorious warehouses for the mentally ill. While terrifying mental health remedies can be traced back to prehistoric times, it’s the dawn of the asylum era in the mid-1700s that marks a period of some of the most inhumane mental health treatments. Yet, the inhumane history of mental health treatment reminds us how far we have already come. It’s an understatement to say that there is work left to be done. Mental health treatment today is no walk in the park - from insurance companies denying coverage, to a lasting stigma, to the fact that the many of the most severely mentally ill among us to their own devices on the streets or relegated to prison.
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