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The Kirkbride plan is developed in the United States; The moral treatment era begins
Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) developed his requirements of asylum design based on a philosophy of Moral Treatment and environmental determinism. The typical floor plan, with long rambling wings arranged en echelon, was meant to promote privacy and comfort for patients. The building form itself was meant to have a curative effect, "a special apparatus for the care of lunacy. The idea of institutionalization was thus central to Kirkbride's plan for effectively treating the insane. -
Dorothea Dix
In 1841, Dix volunteered to teach a Sunday School for female inmates at a jail in East Cambridge, MA. Here, she witnessed the suffering of women with mental illness. They were chained to beds, starved, and abused – punished as if they were criminals. Horrified by this maltreatment, Dix began visiting jails and workhouses across Massachusetts and documenting her findings.Between 1843 and 1880, she helped to establish 32 new mental hospitals across the U.S. -
Indianapolis Hospital for the Insane is founded
The hospital was established in 1848. In 1950, it had 2,500 patients. Allegations of abuse, funding shortfalls, and the move to less institutional methods of treatment led to its closure in 1994. Since then efforts have been made to redevelop the site for various uses. -
Stratification Grows Between Asylums
Over time, publicly funded asylums served to isolate large numbers of patients in custodial care away from the public for the lowest possible cost. Asylums routinely featured overcrowded, deteriorating facilities, staff shortages, and highly restrictive and abusive practices to maintain order. Case studies document how many individuals in state funded asylums remained institutionalized for the rest of their lives without any hope of effective treatment. -
Elizabeth Packard Involuntarily Commited to Institution
In 1860, Theophilus, her husband, committed Packard to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane. The law in Illinois stated that a women could be institutionalized at the request of their husbands, without any evidence of mental health issues. She vigorously protested her confinement throughout her time there. In the spring of 1863, hospital officials declared her incurably insane and released her from the institution after 3 years of being institutionalized. -
Nellie Bly Goes Undercover
Journalist Nellie Bly goes undercover to record how prisoners were treated like Prisoners; escape was close to impossible. Doctors pulled the hair of the patients and were forced into solitary confinement. -
Sterilization of the Mentally Ill
In 1907, CT was also first to mandate the sterilization of an individual after a board of experts recommended it. Thirty-three states ultimately adopted sterilization mandates. Ultimately, more than 65,000 mentally ill people were sterilized. In Buck v Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. argued that sterilizations did not violate people’s rights, concluding “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”