Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum

Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum PDF Author: Mary Huestis Pengilly
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
Discover an unforgettable memoir written by Mary Huestis Pengilly. This powerful book provides a rare look into the life of a 19th-century psychiatric patient and offers valuable insights into mental health and societal stigma. A must-read for anyone interested in the human experience.

Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum

Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum PDF Author: Mary Huestis Pengilly
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
Discover an unforgettable memoir written by Mary Huestis Pengilly. This powerful book provides a rare look into the life of a 19th-century psychiatric patient and offers valuable insights into mental health and societal stigma. A must-read for anyone interested in the human experience.

The Doyle Diary

The Doyle Diary PDF Author: Charles Altamont Doyle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description


Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1857-1997

Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1857-1997 PDF Author: Sarah C. Sitton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781603447393
Category : Mental health services
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century "cult of curability" engendered the optimistic belief that mental illness could be cured under ideal conditions--removal from the stresses of everyday life to asylum, a pleasant, well-regulated environment where healthy meals, daily exercise, and social contact were the norm. This utopian view led to the reform and establishment of lunatic asylums throughout the United States. The Texas State Lunatic Asylum (later called the Austin State Hospital) followed national trends, and its history documents national mental health practices in microcosm. Drawing on diverse sources--patient records from the nineteenth century, papers and reports of the institution's various superintendents, transcripts of interviews of former employees, newspaper accounts, personal memoirs, and interviews--Sarah C. Sitton has recreated what life in "our little town" was like from the institution's opening in 1861 to its de-institutionalization in the 1980s and 1990s. For more than a century, the asylum community resembled a self-sufficient village complete with its own blacksmith shop, icehouse, movie theater, brass band, baseball team, and undertakers. Beautifully landscaped grounds and gravel lanes attracted locals for Sunday carriage drives. Patients tended livestock, tilled gardens, helped prepare meals, and cleaned wards. Their routines might include weekly dances and religious services, as well as cold tubs, paraldehyde, and electroshock. Employees, from the superintendent on down, lived on the grounds, and their children grew up "with inmates for playmates." While the superintendent exercised almost feudal power, deciding if staff could date or marry, a multigenerational "clan" of several interlinked families controlled its day-to-day operations for decades. With the current emphasis on community-based care for the mentally ill and the negative consequences of de-institutionalization increasingly apparent, the debate on how best to care for the state's--and the nation's--mentally ill continues. This examination offers historical and practical insights which will be of interest to practitioners and policy makers in the field of mental health as well as to individuals interested in the history of the state of Texas.

Administrations of Lunacy

Administrations of Lunacy PDF Author: Mab Segrest
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972980
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." —Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America—centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.

Ten Days in a Mad-House (EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition)

Ten Days in a Mad-House (EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition) PDF Author: Nellie Bly
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 155480860X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Nightmare Factories

Nightmare Factories PDF Author: Troy Rondinone
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421432676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Drawing from fictional and real accounts, movies, personal interviews, and tours of mental hospitals both active and defunct, Rondinone uncovers a story at once familiar and bizarre, where reality meets fantasy in the foggy landscape of celluloid and pulp.

Women of the Asylum

Women of the Asylum PDF Author: Jeffrey L. Geller
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Geller and Harris's accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals that often even the prevailing conventions reinforced the perception that these women were "mad.".

Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay

Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay PDF Author: Sarah Ann Pinto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319942441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book traces the historical roots of the problems in India’s mental health care system. It accounts for indigenous experiences of the lunatic asylum in the Bombay Presidency (1793-1921). The book argues that the colonial lunatic asylum failed to assimilate into Indian society and therefore remained a failed colonial-medical enterprise. It begins by assessing the implications of lunatic asylums on indigenous knowledge and healing traditions. It then examines the lunatic asylum as a ‘middle-ground’, and the European superintendents’ ‘common-sense’ treatment of Indian insanity. Furthermore, it analyses the soundscapes of Bombay’s asylums, and the extent to which public perceptions influenced their use. Lunatic asylums left a legacy of historical trauma for the indigenous community because of their coercive and custodial character. This book aims to disrupt that legacy of trauma and to enable new narratives in mental health treatment in India.

The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880

The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 PDF Author: Wendy Gonaver
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648458
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants. Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War

Civilian Lunatic Asylums During the First World War PDF Author: Claire Hilton
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030548716
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This open access book explores the history of asylums and their civilian patients during the First World War, focusing on the effects of wartime austerity and deprivation on the provision of care. While a substantial body of literature on ‘shell shock’ exists, this study uncovers the mental wellbeing of civilians during the war. It provides the first comprehensive account of wartime asylums in London, challenging the commonly held view that changes in psychiatric care for civilians post-war were linked mainly to soldiers’ experiences and treatment. Drawing extensively on archival and published sources, this book examines the impact of medical, scientific, political, cultural and social change on civilian asylums. It compares four asylums in London, each distinct in terms of their priorities and the diversity of their patients. Revealing the histories of the 100,000 civilian patients who were institutionalised during the First World War, this book offers new insights into decision-making and prioritisation of healthcare in times of austerity, and the myriad factors which inform this.