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Insane Asylums Weren't So Bad: Oliver Sacks

By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff

Posted Sep 13, 2009 5:35 PM CDT
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(Newser) – Mental health experts have lost touch with the benefits of old-fashioned insane asylums, where patients once enjoyed a sense of community and jobs like cleaning and farming, Oliver Sacks writes in the New York Review of Books. Touching on a new book of Christopher Payne photographs called Asylum—which offers "a mute and heartbreaking testimony" to "once-heroic structures"—Sacks argues that modern state hospitals, which rely on antipsychotic drugs, ignore "the benign aspects of asylums."

Drugs used in today's hospitals may stop delusions and hallucinations, but leave subtler symptoms like apathy untouched—and lead to patients being discharged and readmitted carousel-style. Meanwhile, "patients' rights" laws prevent them from working, so they sit like zombies "in front of the now-never-turned-off TV." For now, only a clubhouse in New York and a few residential communities for the mentally ill offer hope that "even the most deeply ill people… may be enabled to live satisfying and productive lives."

Staff members gather in the 1880s in front of the Willard Psychiatric Center, formerly known as the Willard Asylum for the Insane in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Staff members gather in the 1880s in front of the Willard Psychiatric Center, formerly known as the Willard Asylum for the Insane in the Finger Lakes region of New York.   (AP Photo/New York Public Library)
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The millions of mentally ill remain the least supported, the most disenfranchised, and the most excluded people in our society today.
- Oliver Sacks

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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 6 comments
OWLWOMANXXXX
Sep 14, 2009 12:38 PM CDT
too many homeless are mentally challenged...and likewise...there never seems to be any follow up on them...I think the drugs and a permanent safe haven would be the answer to a more humane solution for these people
justme
Sep 14, 2009 12:06 PM CDT
Instead of warehousing, modern treatment drugs them into submission and provides a little followup. Many can function well with just the drug treatment, others were better off in benign institutions that managed their every need. As always, sweeping generalities are generally wrong (pun intended).
luluzz
Sep 14, 2009 5:38 AM CDT
We usually only hear about the ugly side of "asylums" but letting all those mentally ill people go to make their own way through the world was not right. So many need a place to live and help to get through the day. Drugging them is not a solution either. With today's laws and regulations, mental institutions would be a safer way to care for them than we are doing now. Mental health in this country needs to be taken seriously for a change, and not swept under the carpet.

 
schizophrenia • antipsychotic drugs • mental illness • asylum • mental hospital

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