Institutions Through Time
The Institute for Personality and Ability Testing has certified Robert Fettgather as a Stress Management Trainer, and Medical Hypnosis Seminars of the Los Gatos Institute has certified him in Clinical Hypnotherapy. At Santa Clara University, Graduate Department of Education and Counseling Psychology, his studies included Health Education and Behavioral Medicine. Robert Fettgather has completed Hospice Training with Hospice of the Valley.
The Ancient Greeks eschewed institutions as family members cared for most people with mental illness. Some of you may embrace the greek ideal of caring for a mentally ill family member at home. In the Middle Ages, Muslim Arabs, established asylums as early as the 8th century as a place of refuge for people with mental illness. By the 1600’s Almshouses were created to house not just the poor, but also mentally ill, handicapped, and delinquent youth. At some point, these places became more like prisons than places of care. The "madhouse" emerged as people were chained to walls and kept in dungeons.
In the 1700’s, after the French Revolution, French physician Phillippe Pinel's Moral Therapy took over the Bicêtre insane asylum and forbade the use of chains and shackles. In your required reading, Barlow notes that in Moral Therapy "Relationships were carefully nurtured. Individual attention clearly emphasized positive consequences for appropriate interactions and behavior, and restraint and seclusion were eliminated". It seems that throughout history institutions could sometimes achieve care goals as long as populations were small.
After the mid 1800s moral therapy declined as a treatment for mentally ill people in America partly due to the great influx of immigrants which increased the population of institutions. There was another factor in the decline of Moral Therapy- the unanticipated effects of reform. Dorothea Dix worked on behalf of people with mental illness incarcerated in jails and poorhouses at the end of the nineteenth century. Dix's noble reforms greatly improved living conditions. Ironically, with improved institutions, more people were institutionalized. With greater populations, conditions deteriorated.
The pseudoscience of eugenics was designed to purge the population of "inferior" persons by combining sterilization and institutionalization laws, as well as marriage restrictions. By the early 1900's it was fairly common to have institution residents sterilized, and in 1927, The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, ruled that the forced sterilization of people with disabilities was not a violation of their constitutional rights. California was a national leader in forced sterilization (the state's leading sterilization mill in 1933 was Sonoma State Home, now Sonoma Developmental Center, with 388 operations).
