Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental health units, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders, such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Psychiatric hospitals vary widely in their size and grading. Some hospitals may specialize only in short term or outpatient therapy for low-risk patients. Others may specialize in the temporary or permanent care of residents who, as a result of a psychological disorder, require routine assistance, treatment, or a specialized and controlled environment. Patients are often admitted on a voluntary basis, but people whom psychiatrists believe may pose a significant danger to themselves or others may be subject to involuntary commitment and involuntary treatment. Psychiatric hospitals may also be referred to as psychiatric wards or units when they are a subunit of a regular hospital.
Daniel Hack Tuke was an English physician and expert on mental illness.
John Conolly was an English psychiatrist. He published the volume Indications of Insanity in 1830. In 1839, he was appointed resident physician to the Middlesex County Asylum where he introduced the principle of non-restraint into the treatment of the insane, which led to non-restraint became accepted practice throughout England. With colleagues he founded the 'Provincial Medical and Surgical Association', and founded the 'British and Foreign Medical Review, or, A Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine'.
The Retreat, commonly known as the York Retreat, is a place in England for the treatment of people with mental health needs. Located in Lamel Hill in York, it operates as a not for profit charitable organisation.
Moral treatment was an approach to mental disorder based on humane psychosocial care or moral discipline that emerged in the 18th century and came to the fore for much of the 19th century, deriving partly from psychiatry or psychology and partly from religious or moral concerns. The movement is particularly associated with reform and development of the asylum system in Western Europe at that time. It fell into decline as a distinct method by the 20th century, however, due to overcrowding and misuse of asylums and the predominance of biomedical methods. The movement is widely seen as influencing certain areas of psychiatric practice up to the present day. The approach has been praised for freeing sufferers from shackles and barbaric physical treatments, instead considering such things as emotions and social interactions, but has also been criticised for blaming or oppressing individuals according to the standards of a particular social class or religion.
St Bernard's Hospital, also known as Hanwell Insane Asylum and the Hanwell Pauper and Lunatic Asylum, was built for the pauper insane, opening as the First Middlesex County Asylum in 1831. Some of the original buildings are now part of the headquarters for the West London Mental Health NHS Trust (WLMHT).
Robert Gardiner Hill MD was a British surgeon specialising in the treatment of lunacy. He is normally credited with being the first superintendent of a small asylum to develop a mode of treatment in which reliance on mechanical medical restraint and coercion could be dropped altogether. In practice he reached this situation in 1838.
Holloway Sanatorium was an institution for the treatment of those suffering temporary mental illness, situated on 22 acres (9 ha) of aesthetically landscaped grounds near Virginia Water, Surrey, England, about 22 miles (35 km) south-west of Charing Cross. Its largest buildings, including one listed at Grade I, have been restored and supplemented as Virginia Park, chiefly comprising Crossland House, The Grange, Gillespie House and Connolly Court. It has a spa complex, gymnasium, multi-purpose sports hall and an all-weather tennis court.
Sir John Batty Tuke PRCPE FRSE LLD was one of the most influential psychiatrists in Scotland in the late nineteenth century, and a Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1910. Tuke's career in Edinburgh from 1863 to 1910 spanned a period of significant social and political changes in asylum governance and care in Scotland. Tuke's professional success in public and private practice and his powerful role in several prominent medical societies allowed him to influence his colleagues toward a more physiological understanding of mental illness and its treatment.
The fall of the lunatic asylum and its gradual transformation into, and eventual replacement by, the modern psychiatric hospital, explains the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry. While there were earlier institutions that housed the "insane", the conclusion that institutionalization was the correct solution to treating people considered to be "mad" was part of a social process in the 19th century that began to seek solutions for outside families and local communities.
Sir John Charles Bucknill was an English psychiatrist and mental health reformer. He was the father of judge Sir Thomas Townsend Bucknill QC MP.
Harriet Sarah, Lady Mordaunt was the Scottish wife of an English baronet and Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Mordaunt. She was the respondent in a sensational divorce case in which the Prince of Wales was embroiled, and after a counter-petition had led to a finding of mental disorder she spent the remaining 36 years of her life out of sight in a series of privately rented houses, and then in various private lunatic asylums, finally ending her days in Sutton, Surrey.
Rufus Wyman (1778–1842) was an American physician. He was the first physician and superintendent of the Asylum for the Insane, renamed in 1823 to McLean Hospital, part of the Massachusetts General Hospital system, and the first mental hospital in the state.
Edward Parker Charlesworth (1783–1853) was an English physician, known as an innovator in psychiatric treatment.
Charles Molesworth Tuke was an English surgeon, working in the field of psychiatric care, and first-class cricketer.
Sir James Coxe MD FRSE (1811–1878) was a Scottish physician and expert on psychiatry. Controversially he linked mental illness with a distancing from religion and with a parallel deterioration of the body. Rather more productively, he was an early campaigner against restraint in asylums, and he advocated greater training of women in the field of medicine.
Chiswick Asylum was an English asylum established by Edward Francis Tuke and his wife Mary as Manor House Asylum in Chiswick, in about 1837. It was continued by his son, Thomas Harrington Tuke (1826-1888), before moving to Chiswick House in 1892 and becoming the Chiswick House Asylum, where it was run by two of Thomas Tuke's sons.
Dr John Fraser FRSE FRCPE (1844–1925) was a Scottish physician. He was Commissioner of Lunacy for Scotland from 1895 to 1910.
