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Back to #502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung, with Andrew Scull.

Did Early Asylums Do Good Work?

Andrew Scull believes the early asylums did good work and that some patients recovered during their stays. They were not discharging 80% of their patients. They were discharging 35 or 40%.

Every year left behind a batch of chronic patients, and the next year the same pattern repeated. Over time the ratio of new patients to chronic patients got worse and worse. The image of the asylum became the chronic patient who had not recovered, who might spend years or decades there and leave only in a pine box. As the asylums grew more overcrowded, conditions deteriorated, patients were often abused, and psychiatrists did not know what to do with them. In the late 19th century the promise had been 70% or 80% cures. Counted against everyone still inside, the figure was more like 10 or 12%, because the old patients were mixed with the new.

The unrecovered patients stayed on, so the public picture of the asylum collapsed even though some people had gotten better.

Grokipedia·Andrew Scull

Transcript

#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung ·

Lex Fridman Podcast

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