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1. Although Reil is supposed to have had very limited contact with patients, he makes some interesting points including talking about how he feels doctors have an ability to help and make a difference here in the field of psychiatry. He does say that there are very few psychiatrists and this is one of the reasons he is promoting the idea of an institution where patients go for this specifically. Is this what begins to separate psychiatry from the practice of medicine as a specialization? The fact that few doctors are interested in it and separate facilities for patients exist? (12-14) — Ruth Curran
2. The distinction made between “nervous disorders” and “pyschiatric illness is interesting here (25). They clearly both involve issues with the mind and are altering the person’s ability to function but they are both treated differently and even by different doctors, what is the distinction here that is keeping them from being classified together? (25) —Ruth Curran
1. It is interesting to see the paradoxes listed in the reading as it was stated that Rush in particular proclaimed one thing in his textbook, yet he practiced another at his hospital. Was this common throughout psychiatric treatment when it was becoming more mainstream? And do we see similar patterns of this today?-Margie Jones
2. The contrast between the neurological and situational cause of mental illness is a complex pattern to follow in the reading. I am curious how we have reached today's seemingly even distribution of cause of mental illness.-Margie Jones
1. Shorter pointed out that the US did not have much of a pre-modern madhouse phase, unlike in Europe, as well as that the US did not go through the same reform European countries did until later. What impact might these differences have had on the history of mental health care in the US moving forward? - Morgan Kelley
2. Shortner addressed a number of explanations for the increased number of asylum patients in the 19th century and concluded that the most likely reason was a genuine increase in the number of people who required care and wider changes in who was responsible for that care. One thing that he did not address that I had wondered about was how increased legitimacy of asylums as an institution and psychiatry as a field might have made that sort of care more desirable to those who might have once been weary of the new practices; could this have been a reason for the increase as well? - Morgan Kelley