Admissions to Scottish Mental Hospitals in the Last Hundred Years

Abstract

The increase in admissions to mental hospitals in Scotland since 1941 shows no sign of abating, and it seems proper to examine the phenomenon historically with the hope that information relevant to the present situation will emerge. Before 1857 mental hospital statistics in Scotland were quite unreliable. There were in force three Acts of Parliament which were intended to regulate the confinement and treatment of the mentally ill and to make provision for the keeping of accurate records. Unfortunately, these Acts were so loosely worded and so ambiguous that they were almost impossible to administer. Outside the seven new Scottish Royal Asylums the plight of the insane was indeed pitiable. An American woman, Miss Dorothea Lynde Dix, who had retired from school teaching and assumed as her mission in life the amelioration of conditions in prisons and lunatic asylums, with considerable success in her own country, visited Scotland in 1855 and inspected a number of asylums near Edinburgh. Finding their inmates badly treated and in a most miserable condition, she at once went to London and laid this information with much circumstantial detail before the Secretary of State for the Home Department, who decided that the evidence justified the appointment of a Royal Commission. The Commission was appointed in the same year: To inquire into the state of lunatic asylums in Scotland and the existing law in reference to lunatics and lunatic asylums in that part of the United Kingdom. The report was presented in 1857, and on its recommendations was based the Lunacy (Scotland) Act of 1857, which remains today the backbone of the Scottish lunacy code. Possibly the most important result of this Act, which took effect on January 1, 1858, was the setting up of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland and with it the machinery for recording accurate statistics of mental hospital admissions.