Word: weres
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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The 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...
Out of 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...
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...
"Security" was the watchword for more than half a century in 99% of both public and private mental hospitals. Gates were guarded to prevent escapes. An attending doctor or nurse had to go through what Dr. Herman B. Snow, director at St. Lawrence, calls "the ritual of the key" to...
Worse even than locked doors was the intimate desocialization and dehumanization of the patients. On admission to most hospitals, they were stripped of their own clothes, allowed only shapeless, unbelted robes and floppy slippers. Wristwatches were locked up (the crystals might be broken and used in suicide attempts). Eyeglasses were...