Provided by David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
Surgeon General of the United States of America
Chapter 1
Separation of Treatment Symptoms
In colonial times in the United States, people with mental illness were described as“lunatics” and were largely cared for by families. There was no concerted effort to treat mental illness until urbanization in the early 19th century created a societal problem that previously had been relegated to families scattered among small rural communities. Social policy assumed the form of isolated asylums where persons with mental illness were administered the reigning treatments of the era. By the late 19th century, mental illness was thought to grow“out of a violation of those physical, mental and moral laws which, properly understood and obeyed, result not only in the highest development of the race, but the highest type of civilization” (cited in Grob, 1983). Throughout the history of institutionalization in asylums (later renamed mental hospitals), reformers strove to improve treatment and curtail abuse. Several waves of reform culminated in the deinstitutionalization movement that began in the 1950s with the goal of shifting patients and care to the community.
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