Bring Back the Asylum. Should We Save State Sanitariums?

When you hear the world asylum, you probably think either political or mental and if you ruminate on the latter, you're likely to imagine horrific conditions and rampant human rights violations, and not without good reason. Is the concept of the state asylum so vile though? This video looks at the history of the U.S. state mental hospitals from their inception to their demise over the last 200 years in comparison to our current care and treatment of those who suffer from mental illnesses. Were mental hospitals as horrible as we have been led to believe and even if they were, is the current state of mental healthcare significantly improved from that of a hundred years ago?

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References:

Douglas, K. S., Guy, L. S., & Hart, S. D. (2009). Psychosis as a risk factor for violence to others: a meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 135(5), 679.

Fazel, S., Gulati, G., Linsell, L., Geddes, J. R., & Grann, M. (2009). Schizophrenia and violence: systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS medicine, 6(8).

Gleason, E. S. (2014). Lunatic: The rise and fall of an American asylum.

Joyal, C., Dubreucq, J.-L., Gendron, C., & Millaud, F. (2007). Major Mental Disorders and Violence: A Critical Update. Current Psychiatry Reviews, 3(1), 33–50.

Torrey, E. F. (2014). American psychosis: How the Federal government destroyed the mental illness treatment system. Oxford: Oxford University Press.