Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental health units or behavioral health units, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive 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 containment of patients who need routine assistance, treatment, or a specialized and controlled environment due to a psychiatric disorder. Patients often choose voluntary commitment, but those whom psychiatrists believe to pose significant danger to themselves or others may be subject to involuntary commitment and involuntary treatment. Psychiatric hospitals may also be called psychiatric wards/units when they are a subunit of a regular hospital.
Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses.
Deinstitutionalisation is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability. In the late 20th century, it led to the closure of many psychiatric hospitals, as patients were increasingly cared for at home, in halfway houses and clinics, in regular hospitals, or not at all.
Central State Hospital is a 192-bed adult psychiatric hospital located in eastern Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky. In 1869, 200 acres were purchased by the Kentucky State Legislature from the descendants of renown frontiersman Issac Hite to establish a "State House of Reform for Juvenile Delinquents." This was located on the outskirts of what would become Anchorage, Kentucky. In 1873, due to overcrowding at both of Kentucky's mental hospitals, the House of Reform was converted into the Fourth Kentucky Lunatic Asylum, with Dr. C.C. Forbes as its first Superintendent. The following year an act of the legislature renamed it the Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum. In late 1887, it received its own post office, called simply "Asylum". The following year its name was changed to "Lakeland", and the institution was commonly referred to as "Lakeland Hospital" or "Lakeland Asylum". By 1900, its official name had been changed to the Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane. By 1912 it was known as Central State Hospital. Comparable institutions are Eastern State Hospital at Lexington in Fayette County and Western State Hospital at Hopkinsville, Christian County, Kentucky. All three were administered by the Board of Charitable Organizations.
The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) is an agency of the Government of Oklahoma responsible for providing public health services relating to mental illness and substance abuse.
The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, also known as The Superintendents' Association, was organized in Philadelphia in October, 1844 at a meeting of 13 superintendents, making it the first professional medical specialty organization in the U.S.
Asylum Architecture in the United States, including the architecture of psychiatric hospitals, affected the changing methods of treating the mentally ill in the nineteenth century: the architecture was considered part of the cure. Doctors believed that ninety percent of insanity cases were curable, but only if treated outside the home, in large-scale buildings. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists considered the architecture of asylums, especially their planning, to be one of the most powerful tools for the treatment of the insane, targeting social as well as biological factors to facilitate the treatment of mental illnesses. The construction and usage of these quasi-public buildings served to legitimize developing ideas in psychiatry. About 300 psychiatric hospitals, known at the time as insane asylums or colloquially as “loony bins” or “nuthouses,” were constructed in the United States before 1900. Asylum architecture is notable for the way similar floor plans were built in a wide range of architectural styles.
Cherry Hospital is an inpatient regional referral psychiatric hospital located in Goldsboro, North Carolina, United States. As one of three psychiatric hospitals operated by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, it provides services to 38 counties in the eastern region of North Carolina. It is part of the Division of State Operated Healthcare Facilities within the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees and manages 14 state-operated healthcare facilities that treat adults and children with mental illness, developmental disabilities, and substance use disorders. The Division's psychiatric hospitals provide comprehensive inpatient mental health services to people with psychiatric illness who cannot be safely treated at a lower level of care.
Broughton Hospital is a psychiatric hospital located in Morganton, North Carolina. It is administered by North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services.
The Human Services Center in Yankton, South Dakota is a psychiatric hospital that was built in 1882. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Searcy Hospital was a state-owned and operated psychiatric hospital in Mount Vernon, Alabama. It was situated on the grounds of the former Mount Vernon Arsenal, a former United States Army munitions depot dating back to 1828. It closed permanently on October 31, 2012.
Eastern State Hospital is a psychiatric hospital established in 1891 in Medical Lake, a small community 20 miles southwest of Spokane, Washington. The original building was a Kirkbride Plan and the current building has a similar floor plan with male and female wings extending out from the main building.
The Jacksonville Developmental Center was an institution for developmentally delayed clients, located in Jacksonville, Illinois. It was open from 1851 to November 2012. As of December 2012, the 134-acre (54 ha) grounds was still owned by the State of Illinois.
The Utah State Hospital (USH) is a mental hospital located in eastern Provo, Utah, United States of America. The current superintendent is Dallas Earnshaw.
The lunatic asylum was an early precursor of the modern psychiatric hospital.
Political abuse of psychiatry, also commonly referred to as punitive psychiatry, is the misuse of psychiatry, including diagnosis, detention, and treatment, for the purposes of obstructing the human rights of individuals and/or groups in a society. In other words, abuse of psychiatry is the deliberate action of having citizens psychiatrically diagnosed who need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals.
In a study in Western societies, homeless people have a higher prevalence of mental illness when compared to the general population. They also are more likely to suffer from alcoholism and drug dependency. It is estimated that 20–25% of homeless people, compared with 6% of the non-homeless, have severe mental illness. Others estimate that up to one-third of the homeless suffer from mental illness. In January 2015, the most extensive survey ever undertaken found 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. Depending on the age group in question, and how homelessness is defined, the consensus estimate as of 2014 was that, at minimum, 25% of the American homeless—140,000 individuals—were seriously mentally ill at any given point in time. 45% percent of the homeless—250,000 individuals—had any mental illness. More would be labeled homeless if these were annual counts rather than point-in-time counts. Being chronically homeless also means that people with mental illnesses are more likely to experience catastrophic health crises requiring medical intervention or resulting in institutionalization within the criminal justice system. Majority of the homeless population do not have a mental illness. Although there is no correlation between homelessness and mental health, those who are dealing with homelessness are struggling with psychological and emotional distress. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration conducted a study and found that in 2010, 26.2 percent of sheltered homeless people had a severe mental illness.
John B. Chapin M.D. (1829-1918) was an American physician and mental hospital administrator. He was an advocate for the removal of mentally ill patients from the almshouses in New York State to a hospital setting and helped to pass a state law that provided hospital care for the patients.
The Shame of the States is an exposé on the conditions of state mental hospitals in the 1940s, written by journalist and social activist Albert Deutsch. Deutsch, praised as a crusader, nevertheless wrote in the preface of this book that "the day of the individual crusader is over." Taking an historically informed approach, he called for a public reform movement as the only way to enact significant change of the state mental hospital system, emphasizing lack of state funding as the cause of the problems he witnessed, and pointing towards a lack of public pressure on state representatives as the ultimate reason for the hospitals' limited budgets.
The United States has experienced two waves of deinstitutionalization, the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability.
