A history of the mental hospital is explained from 1656 to present. The categorization and creation and mental illness is presented.

1. THE HISTORY OF BOREDOM
with everyday
LIFE
…and what happens when
you decide to do something
about it that highly annoys
others regularly.
Raphael Racanti International
School of Psychology

2. 1801 2012
The new mental health
model of 1800-2012.
Progressive, isn’t it?

3. Moment of impact.
Launch clip 1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=A5C_J0-hRDY&list=PLC9605AA9D797656E&index=1&feature=
plpp_video

4. What is this place?
The origin of mental health
The history of the mental health
system was last compiled by Michel
Foucault in 1964.
His focus is on how the thinking
behind the categorization and
coercive control of madness came
into being.
Michel Foucault
1926 - 1984

5. LEPROSY
45 – 1656
BCE ACE
Leprosy is a disease caused by the bacteria
mycobaterium leprae and mycobacterium
lepromatosis.
Historically, high risk populations are people
who are poor and a weak immune system.
(Sasaki 2001)

6. The Leprosy
Paradigm

7. A few infected individuals survive with this
disease in modern times. You can see what
it looks like in the following slides.

8. India

9. China

10. Africa

11. The body begins to decay while the person is still
living. Their mental and emotional functions are
normal.

12. Leper = Isolation and Elimination
1200s-1600s:
Lepers are ordered to wear special clothing and
shipped into camps. States choose to declare
lepers legally dead so they may seize their property
and finances without legal concern.
1600: Lepers die out. 19,000 concentrated leper
camps are left vacant in Europe.
1656: France creates a similar purpose for the
empty space in the former camps.

13. Present Day
Belmont, Massachusetts
McLean’s Hospital of
Harvard University
1656
Paris, France
The General Hospital
The Hospital
Paradigm

14. The Hospital System
1. The Hospital system does not answer to the judicial
system.
3. It accepts homeless people and mentally ill people
equally.
5. It uses iron chains, rooms in isolation for one, no
bedding or furniture
7. It encourages compliance by administering physical
punishment and force (we saw a picture before).

15. What is a mental hospital?
• By 1830, the leper tradition is formally transitioned to the
hospital system all over Europe. Brains caught in crisis are
now under the control of the new “modern medicine” of the
time.
• A power structure is developed to both serve and deceive the
mentally ill. Why? The explicitly stated goal is to eliminate their
sense of self-”sovereignty” (Pinet, 1801). A self-empowered
person cannot be controlled by the hospital system.
• Methodology of control is upon the physical body:
• seclusion, isolation, restraint, and withholding of basic needs
(food and warmth).

16. Who is mad?
• By 1800, madness is divided into five categories:
– Someone who thinks they are superior to everyone.
– Someone who is raving, or in rage.
– Someone who is in passions with or without delusions.
– Someone who has too many incoherent ideas and conflicting
speeches with or without delusions.
– Someone who is melancholic.
• Note there is not yet genetic, biological or pathological
explanations for mental illness, such as epilepsy or
diabetes.

17. Philippe Pinel’s ‘moral treatment’ (1801-Present)
• Personally invested in the insane after a friend died from suicide. Separated
insane from criminals in confinement and replaced shackles with strait-
jackets.
• Pinel writes handbook on how to subdue people, describes how the tone
with which the supervisor is to approach and how each attendant grabs a
limb of the body.
• Describes cures involving forced isolation and “stripping of sovereignty” of
the individual by increase of punishments until patient complies hospital
routines.
• Advocates separating from family and relatives in order to
break old relationships of power between them
• Hospital cures through permanent visibility, absolute authority, isolation, and
the mad witnessing the madness of others.

18. The Inpatient
Paradigm
In the paper accompanying this presentation on Slideshare is
an addendum containing a collection of patient testimony,
officially approved by WHO, where patients of all backgrounds
provide their own experiences.
The nurse: (on staff) http://www.youtube.com/user/Addydawn#p/a/u/1/uewutyPufNk
(on restraints) http://www.youtube.com/user/Addydawn#p/a/u/2/ZmmW6GKSb2o
The patient: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYyFWe47-V0
The 2008 New York incident: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8aSdqOa0LM&feature=related

19. The Legal Process
• Most countries in the world have adopted Pinel’s moral model and
the General Hospital medical and confinement model.
• The intake process can be summarized as 1) public complaint, 2)
official approval and 3) coercive compliance.
• Police are a huge part of the intake process for steps 1) and 2); they
themselves request further training for ambiguous mental-health
related aggression. Why have we made mental illness a criminal
act?
2010:
The United Nations World Health Organization currently
acknowledges the problem of forced detainment for the mentally ill
but has yet to reach a decision on whether the system’s
confinement and medical coercion model constitutes human rights
violations.

20. Stigma: its foundations and realism.
The simple truth may be that there is no such thing as crazy. Only that, in
every lifetime, there is a time and place for everything.

21. MENTAL ILLNESS:
VIOLENCE AND
PREJUDICE
 Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe,
Schizophrenic Depressive 
FACTS ON VIOLENCE FACTS ON STIGMA
Including verbal remarks, the mentally ill are about The group measured to hold the highest negative
55% more likely to be aggressive when measured prejudice, social distance and mistrust against the
against the rest of the population, but not toward mentally ill were psychiatrists.
strangers.
There is no more likelihood of being attacked by In Canada, 80% of the public felt comfortable with
the mentally ill than by a stranger. someone in a wheelchair while only 46% felt
comfortable around a person known to have a mental
illness.
Alcohol, drugs and low socioeconomic status can In Israel, 40% replied that they would not want a
eliminate most correlations of violence and mental person with mental illness living in their neighborhood;
illness when controlled. 88% said that they would not let a person with mental
illness take their children to school; and 50% replied
that they are willing to help a person with mental
illness but are not willing to be his or her friend.
A schizophrenic is 2.5 times more likely to be In Israel when participants were asked 64% agreed
attacked by someone else than to attack that persons with mental illness can work, 58%
someone. thought that they cannot work in a normal job.

22. Inserting a positive psychological viewpoint:
1. Growing-tip Statistics
This project proposes the comprehensive data
collection of depressive, schizophrenic and
bipolar people living independently and
happily from the formal mental health system.
How can researchers find these people? What
is it we will ask them?

23. Inserting a positive psychological viewpoint:
2. Practical Idealism
This project proposes the reallocation of currently
available public funds to create psychiatric hospital
environments and attitudes in accordance with the
norms of Positive Psychology, including physical
exercise, access to the outdoors and empathy-based
treatment.
A Swedish, state-funded closed-psychiatric unit.

24. Inserting a positive psychological viewpoint:
3. Alternatives
This project proposes the
installation of initiatives like
The Soteria Project:
A Soteria Project clone in Bern, Switzerland.
Under the direction of Dr. Loren
L. Mosher in San Francisco
between 1971 and 1983, up to
90% of acute schizophrenic
episodes were treated at a lower
cost to the community without
isolation, restraining, or
medications (forced or
voluntary).
Moreover, two-year follow-up
showed patients did not
experience a remission
episode compared to controls.
The project’s findings were
replicated in Montgomery
County, Maryland and Bern,
Switzerland in the 2000’s.

25. If this is all true, why didn’t
things change by now?
• We are still inside a leprosy-based conception of
sequestration and treatment for mental illness (the
General Hospital system and Pinel’s moral model).
• Change is risky and involves big players, such as
national and local governments, pharmaceutical and
insurance companies. Growth-minded capitalism
does not press innovations in this population sector
because those who experience it become dependent
upon the system.
• By its nature, psychiatric units are intentionally
barred from the realm of public knowledge. Our
influences are mainly movies and television, who in
turn reinforce the stigma, who in turn reinforce
leprosy-based thought-systems.

26. What can I do? Action steps:
1. Watch Sean Blackwell’s youtube on an alternative
viewing of psychosis and depression. Search
youtube:bipolarorwakingup.
2. Apply this knowledge to your own community of friends
and family. Volunteer or visit a mental hospital.
3. Join our Section 12 Project, an initiative to have rights
read by personnel who are confining someone for
signs of mental illness. Currently staff is not required
to inform them of where they are going, nor that they
have no rights or that they can be injected or strapped.
Email:evemichal@gmail.com
4. Educate, inform and circulate truth!