Tag Archives: A Mind That Found Itself

The Front Line

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Clifford Beers

Clifford Beers

Though administrators and superintendents get most of the recognition for asylum care, attendants were the really critical employees. Their skills and strengths, their attitudes and moods, affected patients profoundly. Clifford Beers, a Yale graduate who suffered a mental breakdown in the early 1900s and later wrote about it in A Mind That Found Itself, described his treatment at the hands of the attendants at his well-regarded institution.

Attendants Could Often Be Violent With Patients

Attendants Could Often Be Violent With Patients

Beers had been at odds with his attendants because they were so indifferent and deliberately cruel to him: refusing to give him a glass of water when he requested one, neglecting to bathe him, and the like. Beers retaliated with small acts of defiance, mainly verbal, which goaded his attendants into telling him they were just waiting for a chance to beat him.

Man Being Restrained in West Riding Lunatic Asylum

Man Being Restrained in West Riding Lunatic Asylum

Beers recorded that on November 25, 1902, he politely asked an attendant for a drink, was refused with curses, and then answered in kind. This was the opportunity his attendants had been waiting for; one held a lantern in Beers’ dark room while the other knocked him down, kicked him, and choked him. They stopped when he pretended to be unconscious, and left him “to live or die for all they cared,” Beers wrote. Beers showed the attending physician his bruises the next day, but neither attendant was fired for his actions.

Which Was Worse?

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Clifford Beers and His Influential Book

Clifford Beers and His Influential Book

State insane asylums are usually thought to be a little (or a lot) worse than private institutions, and that is probably true in many cases. Private asylums had a bit more freedom in accepting patients and in hiring staff, and that was often reflected in the their general atmosphere and the treatment of patients. However, private institutions could have their own problems. Continue reading →

Pay Matters

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Clifford Beers

Superintendents considered their authority and standing important, but they also appreciated a well-paid job with a cash salary. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, a superintendent’s salary of (usually) a couple of thousand dollars a year was a tremendous step up from the several hundred that many other doctors made. Outside of cities, doctors often had to accept produce or other goods in lieu of cash, or continually dun patients for payment. As the head of an asylum, superintendents were comparatively well-off and secure.

Good salaries did not apply to attendants. Clifford Beers, who described his own mental illness and stay in an asylum (beginning in 1900) in A Mind That Found Itself, said that his institution employed “the meanest type of attendant–men willing to work for the paltry wage of eighteen dollars a month.”

Beers's Account of His Asylum Experience, courtesy Museum of Disability

Beers spoke of one good attendant who was very kind to him, but of others, said: “[they] did not strike me with their fists, but their unconscious lack of consideration…was torture. Another of the same sort cursed me with a degree of brutality which I prefer not to recall.” Another attendant cursed and spat on Beers when he did not promptly obey an order.

Beers graduated from Yale in 1897; this photo is from 1895 but includes students from 1896 and 1897.

Yale Class Photo, 1895.

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