Abstract
Extensive institutionalisation of people with mental disorders has a brief history lasting just 150 years. Yet asylums feature prominently in modern perceptions of psychiatry's development, on a mental map drawn in sharp contrasts between humanity and barbarity, knowledge and ignorance, and good and bad practice. This Review seeks to nuance the standard narrative of asylums by considering the voices and views of those who were in them at different historical timepoints. The arguments are to caution against dismissing inpatient care outright as simply fundamentally misconceived, and to show the ideological background to many structures and changes, which might superficially seem merely clinical and instrumental. The aim of this Review is to bring out what current mental health systems can learn from an evidence-based analysis of asylums' actual successes and failures in the past.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 354-62 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | The Lancet Psychiatry |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 17 Dec 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2020 |
Keywords
- psychiatry
- asylums
- lunacy
- insanity
- medicine
- history
- ideology
Access to Document
- Houston-2019-Asylums-Lancet-Psychiatry-AAM
Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30395-5