Mental Hygiene and the End of the Asylum

Progressive Era reformers believed that mental illness was the product of environmental factors and that it was both preventable and progressively serious.  These beliefs gave rise to the Mental Hygiene Movement, which as characterized by the psychopathic hospital, child psychiatry and outpatient clinics.  All of these innovations were intended to prevent the emergence of mental illness or to provide early treatment designed to avert serious mental disorder. (Overview of Mental Health in New York and the Nation)

Treatment methods began to often include medications.  The person most responsible for changing the way medicine and society viewed the mentally ill was Sigmund Freud, who espoused psychoanalysis as a valid approach for the treatment of mental disorders. These techniques for treating the mentally ill were first introduced to the American medical community during the first decade of the 1900s.

Carl G. Jung, one of Freud's most prominent followers, was one of the first to employ psychoanalytic techniques with severely disturbed (psychotic) individuals, particularly schizophrenics. While Freud's techniques were readily adapted to “office practice, “ Jung's methods were useful with more severely disturbed, hospitalized patients.

In 1900 there were only 222 psychiatrists, but thanks to the work of Freud and Jung, mental illness in America began to transform. Psychiatry became a recognized medical specialty, and a requirement in most medical schools.

Thankfully, the days of the asylum, the only “therapeutic tool" of the 19th century, were numbered in 1909 and would soon disappear. (jzbick@tnonline.com, J. Z.)

Works Cited:

Overview of Mental Health in New York and the Nation. (n.d.). New York State Archives. Retrieved December 10, 2011, from http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/research

jzbick@tnonline.com, J. Z. (n.d.). Treatment for the insane improved in the early 1900s | Times News Online. Times News Online. Retrieved December 9, 2011, from http://www.tnonline.com/2009/oct/16/treatment-insane-improved-early-1900s