Tag Archives: McLean Asylum

Lighter Jobs

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McLean Asylum for the Insane

Work was considered essential for patients’ well-being and cure in insane asylums. For patients to get well, they needed peace, an unvarying routine, and light tasks that would occupy their minds. Though much of patients’ work helped the institution itself by defraying labor expenses, most superintendents also believed in its therapeutic value.

Often, patients could work on projects they actually enjoyed, and sometimes earn money from them. Since a goal of treatment was to enable an individual to rejoin society, working for money was not discouraged. At the McLean Asylum, women did plain sewing, but also fancy work that they sold. At the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, female patients did beadwork for money. A man named M. B. Viken wrote to Dr. Hummer in 1927 to ask if he could get a beaded belt that he had bought at the asylum years earlier, repaired. By that time, however, Hummer had no occupational therapy at the asylum other than chores. He sent regrets that he could not accommodate the request.

Psychiatric Patients Making Toys, circa WWI

Shoshone Women Doing Beadwork, courtesy Princeton University Digital Library

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Early Alienists

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Luther Bell

Luther Bell

One early alienist was Luther V. Bell (1806-1862) . He was only 30 years old, and Superintendent at McLean Asylum, when the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane first met. Bell observed many cases of insanity at McLean, and wrote about a new form of mania which had formerly been associated with typhoid fever.

Patients were unable to sleep, paranoid in the extreme–often believing their food was poisoned–and frantically violent. Most of the sufferers were strapped into beds so they wouldn’t attack anyone. Bell observed that the patient’s recovery was often as quick as the onset of the condition had been. Most people were well within 3-4 weeks.

Though this condition may seem like a pure example of pseudo-psychiatry as practiced in the early days of alienists, Bell’s Disease has never been dismissed as an erroneous observation. In1981 the term excited delirium was introduced in the Annals of Emergency Medicine to describe this state.

In my next post I’ll describe some of the ways that alienists devised to keep patients quiet when they were in a excited state.