Transformation of the Mental Health Care System in the U.S.
Mental asylums or psychiatric hospitals were first developed in the early part of the 18th century and functioned as hospitals in which mentally ill patients lived and were treated by professional staff. This form of institutionalized care was justified by our society’s past attitudes towards mental illness that were strongly fueled by a lack of understanding. Dating as far back as ancient civilizations spanning from India to Greece, mental illness was “viewed as a form of religious punishment or demonic possession,” (Treatments for Mental Illness 1).
Considerations of the mentally ill being “social deviants or moral misfits suffering divine punishment for some inexcusable transgression” persisted into the 18th century in the United States as the first psychiatric hospital opened its doors in 1753 in Philadelphia, “[serving to] neither treat nor cure, but rather enforce the segregation of [these] inmates from society,” (Fabian, July 31, 2017). It is clear to see how these ideas of mental illness made it socially acceptable to treat these patients as inhumanely as they did in the past. By locking up these patients in a cruel manner reminiscent to prisons, the existence of…
