Balancing the Pendulum: Rethinking the Role of Institutionalization in the Treatment of Serious Mental Illness

Chapter 1 - Balancing the Pendulum: Rethinking the Role of Institutionalization in the Treatment of Serious Mental Illness

from Part I - Introduction/Description of the Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2021

Katherine Warburton and

Stephen M. Stahl

Edited by

Katherine Warburton and

Stephen M. Stahl

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Katherine Warburton: Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
Stephen M. Stahl: Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego

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Summary

The history of serious mental illness (SMI) is grim, from a cultural as well as a treatment perspective. The conditions of individuals with psychotic disorders have swung, like a pendulum, from institutional neglect to community neglect and back again over the past several hundred years. At the core of treatment failure is a failure in mental health policy and funding, with the result usually framed as the degree of human institutionalization in jails, prisons and asylums. In the middle of the nineteenth century, institutions designed to deliver moral treatment were considered the humane answer to care properly for the SMI population. By the mid-twentieth century, those same, now overcrowded, institutions were blamed for the horrible conditions of mistreatment of individuals with SMI.

Type: Chapter
Information: Decriminalizing Mental Illness , pp. 1 - 4

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108920698 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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