Covering Mental Health

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the mentally ill were viewed and treated like degenerates or social outcasts. Many lived in almshouses, or homes for the poor, or jails, out of the public’s eye. In 1841, a young schoolteacher named Dorothea Lynde Dix visited a jail in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She observed mentally ill inmates chained naked to stone-cold walls in cells without ventilation or heat. Dix’s experience drove her to dedicate the rest of her life to improving the treatment of the mentally ill.

She gained the attention of Massachusetts state lawmakers, who authorized funds to improve the conditions she exposed; she also traveled the country conducting several statewide investigations on the mental health situation inside jails and almshouses. Dix convinced state legislatures and Congress to fund the construction of mental hospitals in the form of grand structures set on sprawling grounds, which were viewed as more therapeutic for patients. Straitjackets were to be replaced by farmwork and recreation.