MENTALLY ILL IN ILLINOIS--HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

I will analyze the mental health care system of Illinois form 18760 to 1930 a period during which it evoled from a rural, insulated and self-contained program for "moral rejuvenation" to an integrated, highly professional system for the treatment of the individual through dynamic "dynamic psychiatry" and of society through "mental hygiene." This evolution was both indicative and symptomatic of the much larger transformations in American society during a period, which included tremendous increases in urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and government intervention. In order to capture the effects of these transformations on Illinois' mental health system, I will focus on two of the state's earliest psychiatric hospitals, from the time of their founding in the 1870s, when they were small, independent, and locally managed, to the 1930s, to the 1930s, when they had become corporate institutions fully integrated into the developing state bureaucracy. In order to integrate the effects of policy, professional, institutional, and socio-economic developments, I will survey oversight, reports, state legislative debates and investigations, superintendent annual reports, professional memoirs, correspondence and a number of local, national and international professional journals. I will devote special emphasis to the conditions patients faced prior to, during, and after hospitalization, by utilizing inpatient case records to build a textual data base. I have constructed this data base in a manner that will allow me to perform a full analysis of social history, reported behaviors diagnosis, treatment, length of stay, age of onset and common demographic categories of race, class, ethnicity and gender, at various stages of institutional and socio- economic development. This study is relevant for the following reasons: first, it sets historical and legal precedence in Illinois, because no other independent researcher has been granted court-sanctioned access to these records; second, it employs contemporary methods of sociological analysis on past conditions that have been only tentatively applied to American psychiatric institutions for this period; and third, my analysis of the impatient population will provide new insights into the impact of such dramatic social change of these institutions as well as a better perspective of the historical efforts of developing institutional and extra-institutional organizations in targeting and serving the mentally ill.