Moral Treatment - Consequences

Consequences

The moral treatment movement was initially opposed by many madhouse keepers and medics, the latter partly because it cast doubt on their own approach. By the mid-19th century, however, many medics had changed strategy. They became advocates of moral treatment, but argued that since the mentally ill often had separate physical/organic problems, medical approaches were also necessary. Making this argument stick has been described as an important step in the profession's eventual success at securing a monopoly on the treatment of "lunacy".

The moral treatment movement had a huge influence on asylum construction and practice. Many countries were introducing legislation requiring local authorities to provide asylums for the local population, and they were increasingly designed and run along moral treatment lines. Additional "non-restraint movements" also developed. There was great belief in the curability of mental disorders, particularly in the US, and statistics were reported showing high recovery rates. They were later much criticized, particularly for not differentiating between new admissions and re-admissions (i.e. those who hadn't really achieved a sustained recovery). It has been noted, however, that the cure statistics showed a decline from the 1830s onwards, particularly sharply in the second half of the century, which has been linked to the dream of small, curative asylums giving way to large, centralized, overcrowded asylums.

There was also criticism from some ex-patients and their allies. By the mid-19th century in England, the Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society was proclaiming that the new moral treatment was a form of social repression achieved "by mildness and coaxing, and by solitary confinement"; that its implication that the "alleged lunatics" needed re-educating meant it treated them as if they were children incapable of making their own decisions; and that it failed to properly inform people of their rights or involve them in discussion about their treatment. The Society was suspicious of the tranquility of the asylums, suggesting that patients were simply being crushed and then discharged to live a "milk sop" (meek) existence in society.

In the context of industrialization, public asylums expanded in size and number. Bound up in this was the development of the profession of psychiatry, able to expand with large numbers of inmates collected together. By the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, these large out-of-town asylums had become overcrowded, misused, isolated and run-down. The therapeutic principles had often been neglected along with the patients. Moral management techniques had turned into mindless institutional routines within an authoritarian structure. Consideration of costs quickly overrode ideals. There was compromise over decoration—no longer a homey, family atmosphere but drab and minimalist. There was an emphasis on security, custody, high walls, closed doors, shutting people off from society, and physical restraint was often used. It is well documented that there was very little therapeutic activity, and medics were little more than administrators who seldom attended to patients and mainly then for other, somatic, problems. Any hope of moral treatment or a family atmosphere was "obliterated". In 1827 the average number of asylum inmates in Britain was 166; by 1930 it was 1221. The relative proportion of the public officially diagnosed as insane grew.

Although the Retreat had been based on a non-medical approach and environment, medically-based reformers emulating it spoke of "patients" and "hospitals". Asylum "nurses" and attendants, once valued as a core part of providing good holistic care, were often scapegoated for the failures of the system. Towards the end of the 19th century, somatic theories, pessimism in prognosis, and custodialism had returned. Theories of hereditary degeneracy and eugenics took over, and in the 20th century the concepts of mental hygiene and mental health developed. From the mid 20th century, however, a process of antipsychiatry and deinstitutionalization occurred in many countries in the West, and asylums in many areas were gradually replaced with more local community mental health services.

In the 1960s, Michel Foucault renewed the argument that moral treatment had really been a new form of moral oppression, replacing physical oppression, and his arguments were widely adopted within the antipsychiatry movement. Foucault was interested in ideas of "the other" and how society defines normalcy by defining the abnormal and its relationship to the normal. A patient in the asylum had to go through four moral syntheses: silence, recognition in the mirror, perpetual judgment, and the apotheosis of the medical personage. The mad were ignored and verbally isolated. They were made to see madness in others and then in themselves until they felt guilt and remorse. The doctor, despite his lack of medical knowledge about the underlying processes, had all powers of authority and defined insanity. Thus Foucault argues that the "moral" asylum is "not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics; it is a juridical space where one is accused, judged, and condemned." Foucault's reassessment was succeeded by a more balanced view, recognizing that the manipulation and ambiguous "kindness" of Tuke and Pinel may have been preferable to the harsh coercion and physical "treatments" of previous generations, while aware of moral treatment's less benevolent aspects and its potential to deteriorate into repression.

The moral treatment movement is widely seen as influencing psychiatric practice up to the present day, including specifically therapeutic communities (although they were intended to be less repressive); occupational therapy and Soteria houses. The Recovery model is said to have echoes of the concept of moral treatment.