Abstract
Variations in involuntary hospitalisation across countries
Highlights
In 1817, the UK House of Commons set up a Select Committee to study the plight of “the lunatic poor in Ireland”
The evidence they heard, in the language of the era, was stark: “There is nothing so shocking as madness in the cabin of the peasant [...] When a strong young man or woman gets the complaint, the only way they have to manage is by making a hole in the floor of the cabin not high enough for the person to stand up in, with a crib over it to prevent his getting up, the hole is about five feet deep, and they give the wretched being his food there, and there he generally dies.”
The resultant history of psychiatry is a complicated story of custody and care.[2]
Summary
In 1817, the UK House of Commons set up a Select Committee to study the plight of “the lunatic poor in Ireland”.1 The evidence they heard, in the language of the era, was stark: “There is nothing so shocking as madness in the cabin of the peasant [...] When a strong young man or woman gets the complaint, the only way they have to manage is by making a hole in the floor of the cabin not high enough for the person to stand up in, with a crib over it to prevent his getting up, the hole is about five feet deep, and they give the wretched being his food there, and there he generally dies.”. Subsequent laws led to the construction of psychiatric institutions in many countries during the 1800s and 1900s, rooted in the idea that if some of the people who were mentally ill were to be deprived of liberty, this deprivation was best done in accordance with explicit public legislation, rather than privately by families.
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