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 . In our reading Madness and Civilization, the author states “Everything at the Retreat is organized so that the insane are transformed into minors. They are regarded as children who have an overabundance of strength…They must be given immediate punishments and rewards.” This struck me as a little odd that they would be considering or classifying people as “Children” and treating them as so. -Jake Martin
+Something that is discussed in the History of Psychiatry and in The Mad Among Us is the increase of elderly patients. As families became less willing to care for these individuals, they would send them to these hospitals. Since many of the hospitals were placed far away from cities, it left the patients isolated and subject to abuse. Does the treatment of the patients play into the idea that society viewed these people as burdens? - Darian James
+The economics of caring for “insane” people affect everything from the buildings to the individual families. In The Mad Among Us it discusses the financial difficulties from the perspective of the hospitals, but the other economic factor is the family's financial situation. How did a community's financial situation play into their treatment of these people? - Darian James
+. Let me preface all of this by stating my anti-Foucault bias; having read Discipline and Punish, which I consider to be the pinnacle of human achievement in boredom, I think Foucault gets a fair bit wrong here. Despite his very valid and well argued critiques of asylums, and the state of mental healthcare more broadly, Foucault, in my opinion, ends up falling onto a very anti-treatment view. Foucault erroneously seems to conflate medicalization of mental disorders with ignorance or disinterest in the condition of the patient. I think this tension still exists in the popular imagination, that to be scientific, one need ignore the lived experience of a patient. While not much of a particularly rousing question, I find myself asking why?  Why can’t two things be true at once? Why must a medical eye be seen so often as callous indifference? -RM
+. It’s fascinating to me to compare the portrayal of psychiatry in Shorter and Foucault. I think in many ways Shorter takes an overly rosy view of the role and impact of psychiatric care, especially early care, while as I said, I think that Foucault takes an overly dour view. Where does this fundamental disconnect come from? What aspect of psychiatry are they each reacting so strongly to? -RM