An asylum, by definition, is a place of refuge, a sanctuary. The original asylums were the almshouses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which were mainly funded by nobility as homes for the elderly and incapable. By the end of the eighteenth century these institutions had begun to house “lunatics” as well, and their reputation as protective sanctuaries changed into one of punitive facilities with harsh, inhumane conditions.

     By the mid-nineteenth century, however, those houses of horror were increasingly exposed to the public for their brutality, and a new regimen of “moral treatment” was proposed for this population to replace the barbaric incarceration that almshouses had become.

     The mentally ill could now be made healthy and productive by giving them fresh air, a decent diet, exercise, calm, pleasant quarters, and a productive job in the workshops and farms of these new asylums. These “moral treatment” institutions were funded by socially conscious citizens and by state governments, and their buildings were often marvelous structures designed by prominent architects. By 1880, 139 of these beautiful Victorian mansions and facilities, with carefully landscaped grounds, had been built in America.

     By the end of the nineteenth century, the country’s workforce had become predominantly urban and industrial and no longer rural and agrarian. The extended families native to America’s farmland no longer existed to house their elderly, infirm or odd family members.

     More and more of those who could not survive after moving to Industrial Age cities for jobs ended up in these asylums.

     Their housing capacities became so strained and state budgets were so crippled by the skyrocketed expense of maintaining these overpopulated institutions that squalid, inhumane living conditions soon ensued within these once grand buildings. They came to be known as nuthouses and loony bins, not benign houses of refuge.

     By WWI the practice of “moral treatment” for this now huge population was no longer feasible with their untrained staff and under the impossible demands of their budgets. The modern mental hospital was born.

     Psychiatrists were quick to move in and begin the ugly practice of their new “treatments” on a population of people society no longer cared about and only wanted to hide from scrutiny. 

     In the 1930s these unsuspecting, unprotected, incarcerated souls became the perfect subjects for psychiatrists to practice their brutal new “therapies” of lobotomy and electroshock treatment. These horrific practices could be safely hidden from the world at large behind these disgraced public institutions’ walls.

     Few patients were ever cured with these brutalities, but many were rendered zombie-like and so were no longer a disruptive threat to those running the mental hospitals.

     In the late 1940s the devastating effects of a lobotomy or of electroschock on a person were exposed to the public by the press and these cruel psychiatric practices were no longer widely tolerated in mental institutions.

     In the 1950s the FDA authorized the first use of Thorazine, as well as other mind-umbing antipsychotic drugs. These could then be used as a perfect means to controlling what by then had become an enormous population of mental patients in both psychiatric facilities and regular hospitals. In fact, by 1950 fifty percent of all hospital beds in use in the United States were for psychiatric patients.

     Giving a patient a pill also appeared far less harmful than cutting out part of his brain or applying 400 volts to his temples. Psychiatric medication became politically correct.

     The new FDA sanction of these psychiatric drugs also made it possible to release a drug controlled population back into society, and in 1963 President Kennedy signed a bill that provided over $300 million to build “community health centers” for this purpose. In 1965 President Johnson then signed the bills for Medicare and Medicaid and these government funds could now be used to pay for the institutional care of mental patients and their new drug diets. It was a godsend both to state budgets and to psychiatry’s wallets.

     With the increased marketing of antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs from the 1960s through the 1980s to handle spurious mental conditions, the market for mental health services expanded exponentially. Today psychiatry’s frightening claim is that twenty percent of America’s adult population suffers from mental illness.

     Psychiatrists and Big Pharma, abetted by the FDA, can now reap a financial bonanza from the “mentally ill.” The global pharmaceutical market in 2023 was $1.6 trillion.

     The unfortunate demise of those exemplary asylums of the nineteenth century led to the take over of the mentally ill by psychiatrists in the 1930s, and ever since psychiatrists – with the help of the FDA and Big Pharma – have been able to maintain their stranglehold on the mentally distressed through their vast marketing of psychotropic drugs.

     All the while making a financial killing.