Mental American Monster: The Sprawl of American Psychiatry is an historical documentary set in the mid-nineteenth century. Sevens stories that stem from the Utica State Lunatic Asylum change the history of psychiatry and the story of America.
Support the making of Mental American Monster: The Sprawl of American Psychiatry! Contact Lauren Tenney to be an Executive Producer of this historical documentary! (516)319-4295. Thank you!
Institutional corruption is solidified with misguided public trust and its impact on what types of services are available to whom. Whitaker and Cosgrove (2015) made an argument about the importance of the accuracy of information that people have and their willingness to forego true informed consent, and without legitimate information about psychiatry consent is a fraud. If there is indeed a connection between public trust in psychiatry and availability of tax-payer-funded services – how the voluntary or involuntary nature of state-sponsored programming and legislation changes or stays the same based on what kinds of information someone has about psychiatry remains an issue of concern for people concerned about human rights of those involved with psychiatry.
We ought take it as a warning that The State does not actively acknowledge that there is not a shred of biological evidence existing for any psychiatric diagnosis. The lack of biological evidence creates a scenario where anyone can easily fit into any number of hundreds of scientifically invalid disorders. We ought to take it as a warning that The State is not actively working to out-root the known potential harms, injuries, and deaths that psychiatric practices, products, procedures, and programming can and do lead to within its own state-sponsored service delivery systems. We ought to take it as a warning that The State with vigor creates legislation, regulation, and policy as a way to maintain social control over local populations, while bringing resources to The State.
Whitaker (2017) was clear: “One of the hallmarks of institutional corruption is that an institution will regularly act in ways that promote its own interests, even if that means betraying the principles that are supposed to govern that institution.”
Part of what makes for a corrupt psychiatric industry is that racist, classist trends in involuntary psychiatry persist. It is crucial to call attention to these realities, particularly in light of our larger political environment where racism, classism, and discrimination of all types are emboldened.
In our world of working on abolishing human rights violations carried out via state-sponsored organized psychiatric industries, phrases like “institutional corruption”, “institutional and structural racism”, “psychiatric slavery”, “stop calling 911”, and particularly, “stop forced psychiatric treatment” are ordinarily not allowed to be audibly uttered and nearly never allowed in writing.
Getting to the roots of constitutional, civil, and human rights violations via an array of abuses and neglect, torture, slavery and involuntary servitude as forms of legalized punishment, and manslaughter if not murder that are routinely committed by psychiatry with State power is urgent. Getting to the roots requires people have the ability to speak freely and to question The State and guild authorities freely – without fear of retribution – and to have those questions transparently responded to with the same conditions of liberty.
It ought to be common knowledge that one of the major responsibilities of the Commissioner of the New York State Office of Mental Health is to keep the institution out of the media and particularly out of the news, and in general, out from under the public gaze. I believe that this obscuring of the institution from the public is a way of maintaining the misplaced public trust in the institution of psychiatry and its outcomes.
Of course, problems resulting from capitalism are deeply responsible for The State to feel compelled to protect psychiatry, and that is why it is institutional corruption. If The Sate were forthright about the known risks of psychiatry with the public it would lose not only resources, but leveraged power to socially control people they deemed in need of control.
The State, however, is not simply keeping the happenings of the psychiatric industry out of the public’s scope of knowledge. The State is arming the public via a disinformation campaign. The State is complicit in misleading people, who if experiencing crises are often crises stemming from the environments that we are operating that could be solved with economic resources, fraudulent ideas about the worth of psychiatry with the purpose of maintaining annualized allocations of resources (funds) that the State generates via psychiatry.
The pitfalls and traps of institutional corruption where concerning the law, regulation, policy, administration, provision, and evaluation of state-sponsored psychiatric services are many. People are still unclear as to how to proceed or what to do about institutional corruption when it appears. People are ordinarily completely unprepared on how to resolve such conflicts and minimize the damages institutional corruption causes.
The original motivation of this article was my stumbling over and re-visiting Robert Whitaker’s (2017) “Thou Shalt Not Question Our Drugs” post and Whitaker’s summation that the American Journal of Psychiatry’s “stated mission is to advance the guild interests of psychiatry”.
The American Journal of Insanity established by Amariah Brigham, Superintendent of the Utica State Lunatic Asylum, was the megaphone for the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Insane Institution. At the time of his death, Brigham bequeathed the Journal of Insanity to the Utica State Lunatic Asylum. In 1921, the then re-named institution, the Utica State Hospital (now called Mohawk Valley Psychiatric Center) sold the Journal of Insanity to the American Psychiatric Association and soon after, changed the Journal’s name to the American Journal of Psychiatry. In 2019, the American Psychiatric Association, celebrated its 175th anniversary.
The story of “The Establishment of the Psychiatric Association: An Organizing Body to Strong Arm the State” will be the subject of a future blog. Modern-day journals published by APA do not publish data concerning New York State’s psychiatric system. Current information about the public psychiatric system can be found via New York State Office of Mental Health publications such as the Annual Budget and the 5.07 Statewide Comprehensive Plan, which is a rolling plan of state-sponsored services spanning five years, updated each year. Quantifying current budgetary practices, policies and procedures of State-operated institutions is possible because of federal and sate mandates to make this information public.
A comparative analysis of how the system is now versus how the system was when it was established with the Utica State Lunatic Asylum, the first State-Operated psychiatric institution opening in 1844, will show us ‘why’ things happen the way they do now.
A multi-century analysis of psychiatry that is historically contextualized makes it entirely possible to see how the institution has changed or been emboldened over time creating an historical record which can then be examined for the roots of institutional corruption across the span of the institutions’ existence.
The Asylum’s Manager Logs from the first State-operated institution in New York, the Utica State Lunatic Asylum, hold a wealth of information about the construction and administration of the system from its earliest days. The larger structural institution of public services in terms of resources and in terms of the human capital that was necessary to operate the Asylum System through the Commission on Lunacy, which eventually became renamed the State Hospital Commission after abuses and torture being perpetrated in the Asylum System came to public light. Now of course, it is known as the Office of Mental Health, but legally still on the books as the Department of Mental Hygiene.
Accounts of abuse and torture published by people who escaped their captors being made accessible in pop culture is what moved public opinion – affecting public trust.
In the 1830s, the establishment of a state-sponsored asylum and eventual state-sponsored organized psychiatric industries, was in part, on its face, a response to the human rights violations, torture, and abuse found in the poorhouse and almshouse non-systems outlined in Dorothea Dix’s (1844) memorials to the State Legislature. Dix’s detailed horrendous, inhumane conditions of these places where the mad are captured and detained. Historical data concerning the uses of chemical, mechanical, and physical restraints and holds and solitary confinement, drugs, brain damaging electroshock treatment (electroconvulsive treatment, ECT), lobotomy and neurosurgeries, implanted devices, and aversive behavior modification is the subject of a future blog.
Dorothea Dix was a Southern Sympathizer (Muckenhoupt, 2008). Dix was no friend of the mad, either, and in a future blog, “From the Gaspee Affair to the Civil War” I will detail the kind of pivotal role Dix played in the story of Psychiatry and the history of America in the decades and moments leading up to the Civil War.
In 1855 and 1860 it was Phoebe Davis held at the Utica State Lunatic Asylum who’s experience created rage in the public toward the way those deemed mad were treated. In a future blog I will detail the ways Davis’ claimed experiences of abuse, torture, enslavement at the Utica State Lunatic Asylum can be confirmed in the reports of the Asylum Managers to the New York State Legislature.
In 1891, it was the former inmate of the Utica State Lunatic Asylum William Trull who discussed several of New York State’s Asylums, but also the one in Utica – 1891 was somewhere near when the Asylum System was shut down and the State Hospital Commission was established to coordinate activities of the asylums, which were renamed State Hospitals. Today, these buildings are nearly twenty institutions for psychiatrized adults called Psychiatric Centers, six children’s institutions, forensic institutions, and two research institutions operated by the New York State Office of Mental Health, which will be further detailed in a future article.
Why anyone thought or continues to think that an institutionalized, structural dehumanized response to a crisis often rooted in economic or other traumas because of the human condition was a good way to respond is beyond me. The Asylums Managers Logs contain explicit details about early decisions of the Asylums operations and detailed records of how the institution was funded – and how those funds were expended over the years. The Managers Logs show how the system grew to multiple institutions, within a decade. The Logs discuss staffing and policies, and regulations, and include information from similar entities in other states and countries.
I found these materials in 2005 when conducting a participatory project on The Opal (1851-1860) an inmate written and printed Journal published at the Utica Print Shop on the grounds of the Utica State Lunatic Asylum. The same inmates, all under a form of ‘moral’ treatment called forced labor, printed The Opal and the American Journal of Insanity on the same printing press. The Utica Print Shop is still in operation today and is a printing office of the New York State Office of Mental Health. Considering the many names of the entity responsible for state-sponsored psychiatry in New York State, it is interesting to note that the Utica Print Shop has never changed its name. A future blog, “The Push for Labor as Treatment: Treatment takes work. Work is labor. Forced treatment is slavery.”
If what is important to preserve is what is at the root of some things’ existence, then the history of this place, the Utica State Lunatic Asylum, ought to be accurately preserved. In fact, incorporated into the design of the system at its inception, was the goal to have some future researcher evaluate the system based on the information that was preserved. In a section headed “Nature and Treatment of Insanity and Prognosis (pp. 50 – 53) the Asylums Manager Logs Report to the New York State Legislature opens with reference to a report concerning the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City, and a quote from the report, the chairman of the report committee, Hon. A. C. Paige made, March 10, 1831:
“That in public hospitals judicious regulations should be enforced, for recording and preserving a history of the cases of the patient; with the view of enabling scientific men to extend their researches in this department of science, and from authentic facts, thus collected, to deduce some general principles for the management and treatment of mental disease” (Paige, et al, 1831 in the Asylum Manager Logs, 1844, p. 50).
The Managers (1844) wrote:
We have not been unmindful of these suggestions, and from the first have kept a case book, in which is recorded the history of each case previous to admission . . . we hope to have accumulated a vast collection of facts relating to insanity, from which hereafter useful deductions may be made. (p. 50)
Apparently, I am one of those “scientific men” (sic), and in future blogs, as just broadly sketched, I will discuss in more detail what I have learned.
The responsibility and continued goal of this work is to tell that story of Psychiatry and America, not from the perspectives of those who were in power, but to lay out the facts from the starting point of understanding the consequences of losing their liberty via psychiatric design.
1. Adjacent Systems of Social Control Will Replace the System of Slavery in the 19th Century
2. The Establishment of the Psychiatric Association: An Organizing Body to Strong Arm The State.
3. The Push for Labor as Treatment: Treatment takes work. Work is Labor. Forced Treatment is Slavery.
4. The Fire, the “rational maniac” William Speirs, and the Creation of Forensic Psychiatry
5. From the Gaspee Affair to the Civil War: John Brown the Slave Trader, Dorothea Dix the Southern Sympathizer, and the Establishment of State and Corporate Institutions
6. Abolitionists: Criminal or Insane? Captain John Brown and Gerrit Smith: The Best Evidence for the 19th Century Asylum as an Adjacent System of the Prison Complex
7. A. George Blumer, The Mortuary and Laboratory, The Guinea Pig House, Eugenics, and the Establishment of the Psychopathic Institute
REFERENCES
— (1844). Article IV.: Asylums Exclusively for the Incurable Insane. Journal of Insanity, I, pp. 50-52. Retrieved on August 10, 2015 from http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32436011236542;view=1up;seq=53.
Asylum Manager Logs. (1851-1860). Utica State Lunatic Asylum, Utica: New York. Holdings at the Oneida County Historical Society, Utica: New York.
Davis, P. B. (1860). The travels and experiences of Miss Phebe B. Davis, of Barnard, Windsor County, VT, being a sequel to her two years and three months in the N.Y. state lunatic asylum at Utica, N.Y. Syracuse, NY: J. G. K. Truair & Co.
Davis, P. B. (1855). Two years and three months in the N.Y. state lunatic asylum at Utica, N.Y.: outlines of twenty years peregrination in Syracuse. Syracuse, NY: The Author.
Dix, D. (1844). Memorial. To the honorable legislature of the State of New York. In Dix, D. L. (2001). On Behalf of the insane poor. (pp.32-59).
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Research Lab on Institutional Corruption. (2010). Call for Applications.
Geller, J. & Harris, M. (1994). Women of the asylum. New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situations of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Doubleday.
Hornstein, G. (2005). Bibliography of first-person narratives of madness (3rd ed.). Retrieved on May 31, 2008, from http://webtest.mtholyoke.edu/acad/assets/Academics/Hornstein_Bibliography.pdf
Muckenhoupt, M. (2003). Dorothea Dix: Advocate for mental health care. New York: Oxford University Press.
New York State Office of Mental Health. 5.07 Plan. Comprehensive statewide plan for mental health services.
Szasz, T. (1998/1977). Psychiatric slavery. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Szasz, T. (2002). Liberation by oppression: a comparative study of slavery and psychiatry. New Brunswick (USA) Transaction Publishers.
Tenney, L. (2006). Who fancies to have a Revolution here? The Opal Revisited (1851-1860). Journal of Radial Psychology, 5. http://www.radpsynet.org/ journal/vol5/Tenney.html.
Tenney, L. J. (2008). Psychiatric slave no more: parallels to a Black liberation psychology. Journal of Radical Psychology, 7. https://web.archive.org/web/20160415030011/http://www.radicalpsychology.org/vol7-1/tenney2008.html.
The Patients. (Eds.). The Opal. (1850 -1860). Selected Readings. Utica State Lunatic Asylum, Utica: New York. Holdings at the New York State Archives; Oneida County Public Library.
Trull, W. (1891). Madhouses of America. Cohoes: New York.
Whitaker, R. (2017). Thou shall not criticize our drugs. Mad in America: Science, psychiatry, and social justice. https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/09/thou-shall-not-criticize-our-drugs/
Whitaker, R. and Cosgrove, L. (2015). Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitaker, R. (2002). Mad in America: bad science, bad medicine and the enduring treatment of the mentally ill. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Wood, M. E. (1994). The writing on the wall: Women’s autobiography and the asylum. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.