Looking back at the Salem Witch Trials today, most people would not jump to the conclusion that the afflicted women in these cases were actually bewitched or possessed at the time. While there are lots of theories as to what happened, most scholars believe that the women were experiencing symptoms of Hysteria, which can be […]
Category Archives: histmental2021
The Penrose Hypothesis
Mentioned briefly in one of our Wikipedia readings last week, the Penrose Hypothesis “proposes an inverse relationship between the relative number of psychiatric beds available to a population and it’s total number of prisoners”. Thro…
Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926)
Considered to be the “Father of Modern Psychiatry,” Kraepelin believed that biology and genetics played a role in psychiatric illnesses. He is the first to describe schizophrenia, which he called “dementia praecox.” He also…
Week 2
Hello everyone! This is my #Histmental2021 post for this week! This meme to me is very relevant to the class because it discusses the nature of psychiatry. Psychiatry has evolved a ton but there is no denying that some mental illnesses cannot be cured completely. This is relevant to the readings because they discuss heavily […]
Dead and Forgotten in an Asylum Cemetery
The New York Times. An Asylum’s Final Secrets | The New York Times, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLw2fbVeB-Y. This short video is about the old Willard Asylum in New York that was built in 1869 and finally closed in 1995. Over five thousand people have died there within that time period, and they are all buried in their […]
New Mental health concern related to zoom.
This article from the Guardian talks about this potential new mental health condition brought on by zoom where people who have been on video conferences a lot become self-conscious about what they look like on zoom. According to the article, they are not aware of the distortion that zoom creates which causes them to stress …
Continue reading “New Mental health concern related to zoom.”
Week#2: Friends Asylum for the Insane near Frankford.
Depicted above is a lithograph of the Friends’ Asylum for the Insane. Founded by the Society of Friends, Quakers, as The Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the use of Their Reasons in 1813. Located outside of Philadelphia, PA, Friends’ Asylum was the first private psychiatric institution in the United States. The institution is […]
Nellie Bly and Blackwell’s Island
This article from the Washington Post brings to light the work of Nellie Bly, a journalist in the late 1800s. In 1887, Bly committed herself to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island and discovered the atrocities and mistreatment of patients there. Her investigation is one of the leading causes of the reforms that Grob talked about …
Mental Health in Colonial America
Over the course of the past week we have been discussing the first few chapters of Gerald N. Grob’s The Mad Among Us, as well as several other documents from varying disciplines that address the beginnings of the history of mental health in Colo…
Virginia Asylum’s Racist Records
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/black-asylum-files-reveal-racism/2021/03/26/ebfb2eda-6d78-11eb-9ead-673168d5b874_story.html This is a short and informative article that highlights the importance of studying the history of mental institutions as
