Lecture 9: Social Control or Medical Intervention

Question 1

When was the lunacy reform?

Answer 1

1800-1850

Question 2

What was the lunacy reform based on the principles of? What was this principle, in a broad unspecific sense?

Answer 2

based on the principles of the enlightenment that people who did not fit could be fixed, cured, or treated through scientific means

Question 3

What were the four principles of the lunacy reform?

Answer 3

1. Non-restraint
2. Moral treatment
3. Madness as disease
4. Institutional treatment

Question 4

What was principle 1, non-restraint?

Answer 4

Remove physically restraints that were used to literally chain lunatics or deviants believing that they exhibited behaviours that were dangerous.

Question 5

What did the second principle, moral treatment, involve?

Answer 5

-Psychological treatments through work and appropriate activities that reflected norms of gender, class, etc.

Question 6

What did women’s work in an asylum involve?

Answer 6

Needle work, playing the piano, being dressed appropriately, etc.

Question 7

What did men’t work in an asylum involve?

Answer 7

reading, playing cards or chess, being dressed appropriately, etc. (parlour games).

Question 8

What was the common theme that is represented in all paintings of appropriate activity in asylums (what type of behaviour is displayed)?

Answer 8

elitist behaviour–goal of the institution

Question 9

What type of therapy arose out of the idea of work?

Answer 9

occupational therapy

Question 10

What was the third principle of lunacy reform, madness as a disease?

Answer 10

Involved medicalization and the belief in curability

Question 11

What was there a change in with madness as a disease that goes hand inland with attitude towards madness?

Answer 11

change in language

Question 12

What did the idea that madness was a disease change most importantly?

Answer 12

a change in how people were treated (because a disease is not your fault)

Question 13

Prior to the rise of the asylum, how did people receive care?

Answer 13

in private clinics that may or may not have been managed by people with medical training.

Question 14

What does the fourth principle, institutional treatment, involve?

Answer 14

• care in specialized facilities

- the idea that madness is a disease means that it should be treated medically , in a hospital-like environment

Question 15

In what year did we begin to see the rise (not introduction) of asylums?

Answer 15

by the late 1800s

Question 16

When was the Quaker York Retreat built?

Answer 16

1813

Question 17

What is the period of confinement of the insane often characterized by?

Answer 17

the Quaker York Retreat

Question 18

What is the Quaker York Retreat?

Answer 18

A privately run religious institution that was one of the first places to incorporate moral therapy

Question 19

Where was the Quaker York Retreat built? Why was this?

Answer 19

Built in rural area, far from the urban environment some believed produced more madness

Question 20

What happened at the Quaker York Retreat (what was treatment like)?

Answer 20

Patients were re-exposed or reintroduced to the appropriate cultural behaviours that would allegedly allow them to function better.

Question 21

What was confinement?

Answer 21

-removal of individuals from society and place in asylums.

Question 22

What was confinement a part of?

Answer 22

therapy–rest, pastoral environment, fresh air.

Question 23

What was confinement an opportunity for with regards to medical professional?

Answer 23

observe symptoms and patients, provide better care

-medical experimentation

Question 24

What was the estimated number of people in asylums in 1950?

Answer 24

1.5 million

Question 25

How many patients per asylums in the 1950?

Answer 25

100-1000 patients/asylum

Question 26

What did asylums arguably become by the 1950s?

Answer 26

a dumping ground for society’s unwanted

-critics started suggesting that these are not hospitals

Question 27

What did asylums in the 1950s give rise to?

Answer 27

fist classification system

Question 28

Despite enthusiasm surrounding the rise of the asylum and the corresponding growth of a medical profession that specialized in mental disease, were there many cures that emerged?

Answer 28

no

Question 29

What was a major problem in most asylums? Why?

Answer 29

• Overcrowding

- many people argued that this is because asylums served as the public receptacles for society’s unwanted

Question 30

Who is David Rothman? What did he challenge? (4 points)

Answer 30

• American historian
• challenged the interpretation that these institutions were enlightened responses, based one form, treatment, and improvement
• sees principles of asylums as part of social fears about industrialization and urbanization, therefore create utopian order in the asylum which is removed from these contexts: cities are full of vice
• argued that urban middle class used penitentiaries and asylums to incarcerate deviant members of industrial society (secure their dominant position)
• that these institutions part of the way that e state plans to control their citizens so they would stay in line

Question 31

What did Rothman believe the rise of the institution is?

Answer 31

A progressive facade that transfers authority to an urban middle class

Question 32

What did Rothman believe was the driving force behind institutionalization?

Answer 32

No humanitarianism but instead middle-class power

Question 33

What was the feminist class in regards to morality?

Answer 33

By the turn of the century, experts exclaimed that they alone could not distinguish between he working girl as victim and the working girl as a ‘moral menace’. Women transgressing the traditional gender boundaries and working in the public sphere invited criticism from social critics.

Question 34

What was the goal with peace in regards to what federal policy was and has been?

Answer 34

• policy of assimilation
• transform someone into a more acceptable member of society
• transform from something we don’t understand or appreciate

Question 35

What does Andrew Scull (historical sociologist) argue?

Answer 35

-that asylums are a product of a capitalist economy, where ‘unproductive’ members of society become a burden

Question 36

In what way does Scull go further than Rothman in his argument?

Answer 36

by arguing that they were a product of a capitalist economy

Question 37

What did Scull believe that asylums were? Why?

Answer 37

-a dumping ground for society’s unwanted/unproductive because they were not contributing to society.

Question 38

What does Scull see social control of deviance as?

Answer 38

part of a larger process of increasing state control and giving rise to the ‘expert’ as part of a changing intellectual society

Question 39

What was Scull’s view on the capitalist work ethic in regards to families?

Answer 39

Families were al-too-ready to send their ‘unproductive’ and ‘unwanted’ relatives to the asylum, those social control was not just class-based, but a function of a new capitalist ethic in society. Families struggling to get by in a capitalist framework get rid of their burdens.