interior of trans-allegheny asylum

125 reasons you’ll get sent to the lunatic asylum

Posted by

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Weston Hospital in Lewis County, WV, officially named the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane upon completion of the facility shown here in 1880, was typical of the many that were established throughout the country. Its design reflected the Kirkbride plan in action.

Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride‘s theory centered on what he referred to as the “moral treatment” of the insane, a constructive idea unique to the United States, for mental asylums from the mid to late 19th century.

He advocated moving patients from overcrowded city jails and almshouses, where patients were often chained to walls in cold dark cells, to a rural environment with grounds that were “tastefully ornamented” and buildings arranged “en echelon” resembling a shallow V if viewed from above.

This design called for long, rambling wings, that provided therapeutic sunlight and air to comfortable living quarters so that the building itself promoted a curative effect, or as Kirkbride put it, “a special apparatus for lunacy.” These facilities were designed to be entirely self-sufficient, providing the patients with a variety of outlets for stimulating mental and physical activities.

The Kirkbride plan influenced the construction of over 300 similar facilities throughout North America, some of which were designed by such luminaries as H. H. Richardson, Richard Snowden Andrews, and Frederick Law Olmsted.

And what constituted insanity to West Virginia authorities in the late Victorian era? Marjorie E. Carr published a pamphlet in 1993, now in the Weston Hospital Collection at the West Virginia Archives and History, that tells the history of Weston. Her pamphlet includes the following from the first log book used at Weston (spelling & punctuation left as in the original):

West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, Weston WV
West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, Weston WV
REASONS FOR ADMISSION
WEST VIRGINIA HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE (WESTON)
OCTOBER 22, 1864 to DECEMBER 12, 1889

 

Amenorrhea
Asthma
Bad company
Bad habits & political excitement
Bad whiskey
Bite of a rattle snake
Bloody flux
Brain fever
Business nerves
Carbonic acid gas
Carbuncle
Cerebral softening
Cold
Congestion of brain
Constitutional
Crime
Death of sons in the war
Decoyed into the army
Deranged masturbation
Desertion by husband
Diptheria
Disappointed affection
Disappointed love
Disappointment
Dissipation of nerves

Dissolute habits
Dog bite
Domestic affliction
Domestic trouble
Douby about mother’s ancestors
Dropsy
Effusion on the brain
Egotism
Epileptic fits
Excessive sexual abuse
Excitement as officer
Explosion of shell nearby
Exposure & hereditary
Exposure & quackery
Exposure in army
Fall from horse
False confinement
Feebleness of intellect
Fell from horse
Female disease
Fever
Fever & loss of law suit
Fever & nerved
Fighting fire
Fits & desertion of husband

Gastritis
Gathering in the head
Greediness
Grief
Gunshot wound
Hard study
Hereditary predisposition
Ill treatment by husband
Imaginary female trouble
Immoral life
Imprisonment
Indigestion
Intemperance
Interferance
Jealousy
Jealousy & religion
Kick of horse
Kicked in the head by a horse
Laziness
Liver and social disease
Loss of arm
Marriage of son
Masturbation & syphillis
Masturbation for 30 years
Medicine to prevent conception

Menstrual deranged
Mental excitement
Milk fever
Moral sanity
Novel reading
Nymphomania
Opium habit
Over action on the mind
Over heat
Over study of religion
Over taxing mental powers.
Parents were cousins
Pecuniary losses: worms
Periodical fits
Political excitement
Politics
Puerperal
Religious enthusiasm
Religious excitement
Remorse
Rumor of husband’s murder or desertion
Salvation army
Scarlatina
Seduction
Seduction & dissappointment

Self abuse
Severe labor
Sexual abuse and stimulants
Sexual derangement
Shooting of daughter
Smallpox
Snuff
Snuff eating for two years
Softening of the brain
Spinal irritation
Sun stroke
Sunstroke
Superstition
Supressed masturbation
Supression of menses
Tabacco & masturbation: hysteria
The war
Time of life
Trouble
Uterine derangement
Venerial excesses
Vicious vices in early life
Women
Women trouble
Young lady & fear

Sources: http://www.trans-alleghenylunaticasylum.com/main/history3.html
http://www.lindapages.com/marshall/mental.htm
http://www.wvculture.org/HISTORY/collections/ms2008-085.html

More articles on doctors caught in moral/ethical issues:

Dr. Brinkley seemed to glow like an April Christmas tree(Opens in a new browser tab)

A better race of men?(Opens in a new browser tab)

Busted not for selling babies, but for the abortion clinic(Opens in a new browser tab)

20 comments

  1. Wtf… Women?! Oh ur a female so ur gonna have to go to a prison and be raped every day for the rest of your life

  2. what the heck i knew i was messed up but if u went by this list i would be put in the asylum real quick

  3. Remember that nowdays things works the same way, 2 million jailed in US, often for ganja, throwing jam on the wall in front of wife. As a matter of fact, today people in serious mental illness are sent to regular prison (Are we more civilized?).
    The last book of Psychiatric state that children playing too much and actively (Wich is a sign of strenght and intelligence) are given RITALIN, to please the Big Pharma, so their STOCKS HOLDERS.
    Regards, and take the alternative pill of Matrix, was it the blue or the red?

  4. The doctors during that time just wanted somebody to do experiments on. They committed all kinds of torture and invented all types of devices in the name of medicine that killed people.

    If you were a woman and your husband wanted you out of the way for another woman, guess where you would end up if you didn’t just disappear! Getting thrown off of horses was an everyday thing in the 1800’s! Poor people were the guinea pigs. If you did not have a house or land or if you were a visitor and did not have money, you could be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in jail until you got sick and then you were hauled off to the asylum for the rest of your life and got your brain scrambled; and I mean that literally!

    Those places were nothing but modern torture chambers that were funded by the rich in the name of medicine and the start of the big pharma companies. Sad to say, these places have not changed very much from them to today! It is just a little harder to put someone in there!

  5. I wish I was put into one of these bad Larry’s sounds like a good time, would totally be down to have a lit time with Jim and Jimbo the shrimpo hunter

  6. i wish OP’s would be a little more responsible about the content like this that they publish…these were NOT reasons FOR being sent to an asylum or for being institutionalized; this is a list of reasons given as CAUSES FOR THE CONDITIONS requiring institutionalization!! i.e., WHY they were considered “crazy” or “infirm” and required interment in an asylum.
    readers could use a little more common sense, too; this happened late 19th century–NOT the Middle Ages! though they were grossly unenlightened compared to modern society, they weren’t complete idiots, either. “she reads novels, so we should commit her!” that might have flown 2 hundred years earlier, but by THIS period, reading novels, by ANYONE, was something done by the educated and enlightened, MALE AND FEMALE, and would NOT have been cause for commitment. that is just one simple example, but i trust you see the pattern.
    THAT BEING SAID!! it WAS very common for husbands to commit their wives as an easy out from their marriage! bring them in, claim strange behavior, LIST A REASON (one or more), such as those above as the CAUSE for her behavior, and far too often, no one questioned it. wife protested, and that behavior was seen as aberrant and fitting with what the husband said, and that would be that. he could then use commitment as grounds for divorce, and be rid of her! i cannot remember reading about any case where roles were reversed – wife rids herself of husband in this fashion – but that doesn’t mean it never happened that way. this was NOT seen as unusual or unethical, even, back then; it wasn’t happening constantly, but it happened often enough.
    ALSO TRUE…mental hospitals of that era were awful places for the patients. even more so as we transitioned into the 20th century, and things really didn’t get better til the later third/quarter of the 20th century. patients were grossly mistreated by staff, including doctors and nurses, by other patients, and especially by a system that had NO standards of care until recent history.
    in general? read into the history – the ACTUAL HISTORIES of places like this one, and others like it, and vet the sources for the information given by smaller sites like this. there is SO MUCH MORE to the history than what is presented here, and what IS presented is misinformation.

  7. Can someone explain to me what a Gathering in the head is ?
    Why are Asthma& Epilepsy reasons for admittance to a insane asylum,when they are medical issues ?

  8. I was told my mother’s grandfather was told by a judge not to go near his wife or risk being put into a state hospital. So when he died his wife got $1 and a child who may have been an illegitimate grandchild, or perhaps child of his received the bulk of his inheritance. I was told many people in the family thought he was bi-polar. I have one aunt who is bi-polar, and possibly one great-uncle who was.

  9. According to the reason to be put in the funny farm, was as retardation on the people who came up with these reasons to be subjected to this, 90 percent of the population should have be committed, and some dumbass people thank they are perfect, no medical conditions of any kind , not even a coughing up blood, and if they did well they put in , my dog is smarter then those jerks, and I sure anyone try this is the village idiot, tar and feather them, run a ad stating that It’s stupid so knock it off.

Leave a Reply