Bedlam in Mind: Campaigning Journalists and Insane Conditions

In almost every Western country, bricks and mortar remnants of the public asylum system litter the countryside. Once the jewel in the crown of a lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, the asylum is now a monument to a failed policy of segregating the insane. In Great Britain, for example, scientific optimism that the asylum would yield new treatments for insanity gave way to public concern that such places were harmful to those they purported to cure. As one historian of psychiatric policy sees it: ‘The rise of the asylum is the story of good intentions gone bad’ (Shorter, 1997, p.33).