Maudsley

After the progress with Conolly’s ideas manifest in Colney Hatch and domesticity, a new era of psychiatry came about, supported by Maudsley, turned from optimism to therapeutic pessimism and professionalization of psychiatry and distance from the patients. Unlike other medical professions, psychiatry did not experience major improvements in diagnoses or treatment. During the Victorian era, many new psychiatric clinics were built. The public began to worry about the number of the mentally ill sharply increased. The Times declared, “If lunacy continues to increase as at present, the insane will be in the majority, and freeing themselves, will put the sane in asylums.” I thought it was really interesting that Victorians noted such a sharp increase in the number of psychiatric patients and were so concerned, when before they had prided themselves for having mental asylums and used them as evidence of their superiority over native peoples. What would have caused such high numbers of people to be institutionalized? Was there a changing view of the role of the family where people no longer felt responsible to look after their ill family? Did people resort to asylums for ill family members because they had to work in factories and could not provide the care that their family members would need? Was the asylum a place for putting the mentally ill person in an asylum a way to maintain the family’s status which may have been ruined otherwise?

Maudsley changed psychiatry during his lifetime. He believed there was a physical basis for all mental illness and there were hereditary origins for mental weakness. The idea that mental illness is hereditary was prevalent and can be seen in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte in the character of Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s first wife. Bertha’s mother is insane and her mental illness is hidden from Mr. Rochester as he courts Bertha, however, after he marries, she also goes mad and Rochester attributes his wife’s insanity to her Creole upbringing and her mother. Maudsley would have supported the way Rochester took care of his wife: isolation. The psychiatric movement at the time was one of alienation and as little contact as possible with the patient because the intimate, paternalistic treatments used at Colney Hatch had not worked and the asylums were unprofitable. With Maudsley’s model, the clinics made money and the practitioners consulted wealthy families on the side. I thought it was really interesting how radically psychiatry changed within the span of a century. It went from a form of entertainment with freaks to study as examples of moral degradation to a paternalistic, family-style caring environment, back to a harsh and pessimistic outlook on recovery and mental illness as a whole. Why did psychiatry take so long to catch up with the other medical professions for dealing with illness? I also find it fascinating that Colney Hatch was made into luxury apartments with no mention that it was once a lunatic asylum.