2 - Bricks and Mortar Humanity

Summary

If during the first half of the nineteenth century the quest for mental health took some pathbreaking strides, the pace of change during the second half of the nineteenth century and in the years leading up to World War I was even more impressive, as mental health became a pivotal and contested concern for a wide variety of interest groups. Western governments scrambled to build publicly funded asylums to house the victims of mental illness, an enterprise one nineteenth-century critic called “bricks and mortar humanity.” In this era the asylum emerged as an institution that evoked fear, loathing, and horror. Yet it also offered hope for thousands of families whose relatives succumbed to the anxieties, suspicions, isolation, addictions, infirmities, and unhappiness that nineteenth-century existence remorselessly and virulently bred, as well as the many mental disorders found in aging societies with falling death rates and longer life expectancies. As the asylum steadily became a presence on the social landscape, families of people with mental disabilities increasingly viewed it as a form of public welfare that served a useful, if doleful purpose. The asylum also embodied governments' willingness to assume responsibility for the mental health needs of their populations. Its longevity as a form of public welfare helped to engender a popular appetite for mental health services and overall respect for professional expertise, paving the way for the emergence of the therapeutic state in the twentieth century.