Word: illing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most important thing that has happened in treatment of the mentally ill in our lifetimes," says one of the nation's leading mental-hospital administrators about a revolutionary trend in his field. For a behind-the-walls report, see MEDICINE, Open Door in Psychiatry...
...Touré party compared notes, all hands agreed that the warmest personal experience of all had been the visit to the Libertyville, Ill., home of Adlai Stevenson. In the pleasantly chaotic informality of Stevenson's home, the President and Mrs. Touré escaped for the first time the stiffness of state visit protocol. Stevenson's lone maid bustled about getting food and drink ready while the Touré party inspected the Halloween jack-o'-lanterns which leered in through the windows from the dark and rain outside. (Stevenson had carved some of them himself at breakfast time...
...women patients in ward 37 at New York's St. Lawrence State Hospital, overlooking the seaway then abuilding, were all agitated and ill at ease, and one was frantic. A housemaid from Alabama by way of Chicago, she rushed up to the nurse supervisor, shouting: "Mrs. Holmes has gone crazy-crazier than we are-she won't lock the door!" As a matter of fact, Attendant Irene Holmes was doing just what the doctor ordered. First, the doors of individual wards, then of whole buildings, were being unlocked and left unlocked for lengthening periods up to twelve hours...
...Sight . . . What had happened at St. Lawrence was a dramatic and belated revival of what is essentially an ancient idea: the mentally ill are sick, but still people, and they must be treated as people, if they are ever to return to society. For several centuries B.C., some Greek temples were maintained as retreats, where the emotionally disturbed could recover in a calm and restful atmosphere ("milieu therapy" in the jargon of today's psychiatry...
Advantages of the system, with reduction of physical restraints, were widely recognized and discussed in the 1870s by the American Psychiatric Association. But in North America, as in much of Europe, this was the twilight of a new Dark Age for the mentally ill. More and more of the mentally ill were herded into gigantic barracks, usually out in the country, to be out of sight and out of mind...