What did Dorothea Dix see when she visited jails?

Answer 1

When Dorothea Dix visited jails, she saw mentally challenged persons and people with mental illness who had committed no crimes. Essentially, the criminals, the mentally ill, those with developmental disabilities, disabled children, orphans and elderly patients with dementia were all lumped together in those days. Plus the care was horrible. Those with mental illness were chained to beds, with a lot of hunger and untreated injuries. So she found a lot of neglect and inappropriate care.

Due to reformers such as Dorothea Dix lobbying for the care of the mentally ill, as well as advances in medical treatment, people with mental illness began to receive humane care. They were taken out of jails and put into institutions where they received more appropriate care. Then Sigmund Freud did his research into the subconscious mind and his psychoanalysis added another option for treating mental illness. That isn't to say that there weren't bad institutions where people were committed merely for being different and subjected to experimental procedures.

A man named Phineas Gage managed to drive a rod into his brain during a work-related accident. He was never the same after that. However, this made doctors think that removing a part of the brain of people with mental illness would make them function better in society. They also experimented with electroshock therapy. For the most part, lobotomies and electroshock did more harm than good, and once medications for mental illness were discovered, such barbaric methods were abandoned. Lobotomies are now only used for the worst of seizures, and brain surgeons try to be as precise as possible in what they remove. Electro-convulsive therapy is now only used in the worst cases of depression after many medications have been tried and no other therapy seems to work.