Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture by Hea

Description: Asylum Ways of Seeing by Heather Murray Asylum Ways of Seeing uncovers a patient culture within twentieth-century American psychiatric hospitals that did not just imbibe ideas from the outside world, but generated ones of their own. In illuminating seemingly resigned patients in these settings, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Asylum Ways of Seeing is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient-as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital-that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the centurys end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. Author Biography Heather Murray is Associate Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and author of Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Table of Contents ContentsIntroductionChapter 1. What Cant Be Cured Must Be EnduredChapter 2. Biological Psychiatry and the "Happy Drone"Chapter 3. Communities, Selfhood, and "Lonely Crowds"Chapter 4. From Possessive to Expressive IndividualismChapter 5. Liberating "Those Whose Ways Are Different"Epilogue. Withdrawing from the Fray at the End of the CenturyNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review "[A] unique history of patient cultures in 20th century America...Read as an interweaving of stories, events, and perspectives over historical time, [Asylum Ways of Seeing] offers the reader immersion in the complex intricacies of individual and collective human agency and its often unpredictable and irreversible consequences. Heather Murray is a masterful guide, who provides a wonderfully varied collection of perspectives that constantly challenges readers to expand and consider alternative ways of understanding the historical and personal stories she relates." * Journal of the History of Behavioral Science *"[A] carefully argued and meticulously documented exercise in intellectual and cultural history, a reconstruction of what [Murray] calls patient cultures, which she understands as the sensibilities and emotional lives of psychiatrys twentieth-century subjects as they were shaped by institutions that both offered respite and served as sites of oppression. It is admirably attentive to nuance, human frailty, and individuals shortcomings." * American Literary History *""Highly recommended...Murray explores the somewhat unusual premise that asylums and other residential psychiatric institutions can be places of citizenship that prompt the development of different (i.e., alternative) versions of culture...This is an illuminating read with powerful implications for those working in such facilities, and a must read for anyone who is either advocating for or treating residents of such facilities today." * Choice * Promotional Asylum Ways of Seeing uncovers a patient culture within twentieth-century American psychiatric hospitals that did not just imbibe ideas from the outside world, but generated ones of their own. In illuminating seemingly resigned patients in these settings, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. Long Description Asylum Ways of Seeing is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films. This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient--as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital--that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the centurys end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. Promotional "Headline" Asylum Ways of Seeing uncovers a patient culture within twentieth-century American psychiatric hospitals that did not just imbibe ideas from the outside world, but generated ones of their own. In illuminating seemingly resigned patients in these settings, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. Excerpt from Book Introduction In 1928 the matron of the Racine County Asylum in Wisconsin received a letter from a mother asking how her daughter was doing in the hospital. Since the matron had told this mother previously that her daughter was "extremely nervous and hard to handle," this mother wanted to know if her daughter had "quieted down any." The matron offered reassurance that her daughter had been "down to our Christmas party and seemed to enjoy it very much. She received a package from her husband the day before Christmas and we gave her all the fruit and candy and nuts we thought good for her." Still, the matron was obliged to say that "we do not see any change in your daughter. . . . She does not take an interest in anything. She seems to be perfectly contented to sit and look out of the window all day." This image of an indifferent psychiatric patient, lost in her own private world and staring out an institutional window, would come to have a completely different valence between the interwar era when these letters were written and the post-World War II period. The characterization of a psychiatric patient as oblivious, or even an automaton, a figure that would become so chilling and troubling to patients rights advocates of the late twentieth century in their critiques of mental hospitals, was not so terrifying from the standpoint of the earlier twentieth century but instead was more neutral, simply a way of being in the hospital. As difficult as it may be for twenty-first-century readers to imagine, this figure was considered a soul at peace, in an accepted, if not a coveted, emotional state. It is the changing nature and observation of the patient that is the subject of this book. Images of the automaton patient--passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital--animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century, often serving as a metonym for the nature of mental illness of any kind as experienced in an institution. For Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, writing in 1911, the affect of emotionlessness and acquiescence was especially characteristic of patients hospitalized with dementia praecox or "the schizophrenias," as it was known at the time. In a well-known passage from his book on dementia praecox, he observed that those who were institutionalized for long periods of time "sit about the institutions in which they are confined with expressionless faces, hunched up, the image of indifference. They permit themselves to be dressed and undressed like automatons, to be led from their customary place of inactivity to the mess hall and back again without expressing any sign of satisfaction or dissatisfaction." These kinds of observations have been made not just about patients with schizophrenia but also in reference to the institutionalized population writ large, as though the mental hospital environment itself was inherently atrophying and life draining to its denizens. By the 1950s some social scientists had even given this phenomenon a name: "institutionalitis." Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks evoked this kind of patient figure too when he reflected upon abandoned asylums from his vantage point in the early twenty-first century, noting that it was once "perfectly permissible" for patients to "just stare into space." Perceptions of these institutionalized automatons have not always been stagnant, however, and neither have the sensibilities associated with them, most particularly resignation. This is a book about people with mental illnesses and distress and those in their orbits who cared for and observed them--what I call patient cultures. I focus on the institutionalized, as well as those facing the prospect of institutionalization, their ideas, and their cultural and emotional expression in the face of this. What kinds of cultures, sensibilities, and concepts did an array of psychiatric hospitals as institutions create and facilitate? And how did these both resonate with and generate more widespread thought and culture beyond the hospital? I uncover here the voices of patients, their family members, psychiatrists, and hospital observers, and I consider both state and private institutions, as well as biological and psychoanalytical psychiatry. I explore the lives, writings, and politics of those who faced hospitalization owing to a range of emotional and cognitive afflictions and suffering, among them depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia, in their various incarnations over time, as well as "conditions" once treated in psychiatric hospitals, such as alcoholism and dementia in old age, not to mention distress that patients themselves had difficulty discerning, identifying, and categorizing. I recognize the amorphous quality of a term such as "mental illness," and patients ambivalence about the very idea, whether this took the form of uncertainty about the boundary between sickness and moral character during the early twentieth century, the initial enthusiasm about a more pronounced medicalization of mental illness at midcentury, more rigorous political questionings of labels in the late twentieth century, or a proliferation of psychiatric identities at the turn of the millennium. I also recognize the abstraction of the category of "the patient." While I do not wish to elide important differences regarding class, race, and gender among patients, I suggest that once a patient identity becomes created, these distinctions also matter in relation to the transformative experience of being hospitalized, or being ill, or simply feeling alienated or internally tumultuous, all of which can change an individuals capacity for observation, sharpen political ideas, and initiate more conscious considerations of the emotional lives of others. In addition to patients and their caregivers, the setting in which care was administered is a central character here, hovering in the background even when a patient had not yet been hospitalized or if a place for treatment was uncertain. The difficulty of writing about these institutions is that they are so freighted with a past of well-documented cases of neglect and abuse, whether this took place in the asylums of the interwar period, the overcrowded "snake pits" of the early postwar period, or the underfunded state hospital, the "cuckoos nest," of the final third of the twentieth century. Poignant narratives of exploitation animate both this book and the narratives of other historians. And yet, acknowledging and analyzing the nature of this particular kind of institutional violence does not preclude an analysis of the styles of personhood and institutional citizenship that ran parallel to broader styles of selfhood and citizenship in society. It is in these hospitals that patients gave more conscious thought to the unfolding of time, to the physical and the built environment, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, and to scientific modernity. Psychiatric hospitals are contradictory in the sense that they require withdrawal from society but emphasize sociability among patients, and they have an intriguing ambiguity about them as places, since they can be simultaneously zones of intensified intimacy and sites of oppression. They can be fleeting, transient "non-places," while at other times sites where chronic illnesses played out and where patients lived out their days. The individuals encountered in them offer personal, emotional assessments not just about the nature of violence but about community, individualism, conformity, science, and human rights, all themes that have animated twentieth-century America but that have been especially urgent in the reflections of patients and their observers. As such, these institutions suggest a unique way of seeing and imagining. Within the patient culture of mental illness, resignation has been a central demeanor of the psychiatric institution--captured most poignantly in the automaton patient--as well as a response to institutionalization, and even a strategy within it. I trace a shift over the course of the twentieth century from a resigned, tragic sensibility that this patient embodied to a more possibility-seeking, utopian sensibility that shaped not only demeanors of and attitudes toward mental illness but other political or daily life realities. Resignation contrasted starkly with the institutional and emotional citizenship and community required of one in hospitals, something that became ever more pressing over the course of the postwar period. In insisting upon this style of active citizenship, and in introducing a patient to scientific concepts, the hospital itself had a hand in undermining the automaton that it was purported to create. The hospital interacted with and fashioned forces outside the institutional walls that also upheld and deepened a need for active citizenship and self-transformation: most particularly, scientific modernity in the interwar years, the heightened fears of totalitarianism in the early postwar years, and the political agency of the counterculture and rights culture during the late twentieth century. I suggest that a sense of inevitability was more likely to define ideas about mental illness within the confines of institutional psychiatry particularly during the interwar era, and this posture toward ones lot in life had its parallel in a larger sensibility and mode of engagement with life: a sense that one was powerless to change the way things are, that what cant be cured must be endured. I do not seek to disparage resignation as a sensibility; as philosopher Susan Neiman reminds us, a synonym for "resigned" is "philosophical." Instead I wish to understand how it is that resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation to dubious scientific and political forces by midcentury, to being viewed as Details ISBN0812253574 Author Heather Murray Short Title Asylum Ways of Seeing Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Language English ISBN-10 0812253574 ISBN-13 9780812253573 Format Hardcover Subtitle Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States Illustrations 7 bw halftones Year 2022 Publication Date 2022-01-04 AU Release Date 2022-01-04 NZ Release Date 2022-01-04 US Release Date 2022-01-04 UK Release Date 2022-01-04 Pages 272 Alternative 9780812298208 DEWEY 362.2109730904 Audience Tertiary & Higher Education We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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