Abnormal Psychology

14 CHAPTER 1

Asylums

Institutions to house and care for people who

are affl icted with mental illness.

However, defi cits in rationality and reason turned out to be insuffi cient as an

explanation for psychological disorders or as a foundation for treatment. In the

Western world, the mentally ill were treated differently from country to country and

decade to decade. As we see in the following sections, various approaches were tried

in an effort to cope with the mentally ill and with mental illness itself.

Asylums

The Renaissance was a time of widespread innovation and enlightened thinking.

For some people, this enlightenment extended to their view of how to treat those

with mental illness—humanely. Some groups founded asylums, institutions to house

and care for individuals who were affl icted with mental illness. Such institutions

coped with the mentally ill as people. In general, asylums were founded by religious

orders; the first of this type was opened in Valencia, Spain, in

1409 (Sarró, 1956). In subsequent decades, asylums for the men-

tally ill were built throughout Europe.

Initially, asylums were places of refuge for the mentally ill. But

before long, delinquents and others were sent to asylums, and the

facilities became overcrowded. Their residents were then more like

inmates than patients. At least in some cases, people were sent to

asylums simply to keep them off the street, without any effort to

treat them.

Perhaps the most famous asylum from this era was the Hos-

pital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London (commonly referred to

as “Bedlem” or later as “Bedlam,” which became a word meaning

“confusion and uproar”). In 1547, that institution shifted from

being a general hospital to an asylum used to incarcerate the mad,

particularly those who were poor. Residents were chained to the

walls or floor or put in cages and displayed to a paying public

much like animals in a zoo (Sarró, 1956). Offi cials promoted such

displays as educational, allowing the public to observe what was

believed to be the excesses of sin and passion. The idea was that such exhibitions

would deter people from indulging in behaviors believed to lead to mental illness.

Novel Humane Treatments

At the same time that asylums were incarcerating many of the mentally ill, some

people were trying to treat psychological disorders. For example, in Europe during

the 18th and 19th centuries, a common psychological disorder, particularly among

women, was hysteria—a disorder marked by physical symptoms such as paralysis,

blindness, and bodily tics for which doctors could fi nd no specifi c

medical cause. Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) caused a stir among the

French by proposing a new theory to explain hysteria. His view

was that all living things possessed animal magnetism—a fl uid of

electromagnetism that fl owed in the body through fi ne channels—

and that hysteria was caused by blocked electromagnetic forces.

Treatment, according to Mesmer, should unblock the flow. The

technique he used to do so came to be called mesmerism. It con-

sisted of the healer’s passing his hands (which contained his own

magnetism) very close to the patient’s body to unblock the patient’s

flow of electromagnetism; Mesmer called these hand motions

“magnetic passes” (Crabtree, 2000).

Although Mesmer’s treatment was sometimes successful,

this didn’t necessarily indicate that his theory was correct. For

example, the successes might have occurred simply because of a

placebo effect (such as occurs when a sugar pill helps patients

recover, as we will discuss in Chapter 5), or possibly because the

treatment induced a hypnotic trance, which is used even today to

Asylums were initially meant to be humane

settings for those with mental illness. A victim of

their success, asylums became overcrowded as a

result of an infl ux of delinquents and people with

certain medical illnesses. With overcrowding, the

primary purpose of asylums became incarcera-

tion rather than treatment, as was true of the

Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem (“Bedlem”) in

the early 18th century.

Burstein Collection/Corbis

Franz Mesmer believed that hysteria arises from

blocked electromagnetic forces. He stated that

his technique used the magnetic forces in his

own hand to unblock electromagnetic forces in

the patient when he moved his hand over—but

not touching—her body. In fact, this treatment

probably induced either a placebo effect or a

hypnotic trance.

Bettmann/Corbis