Mental Hospitals vs. Human Freedom

The state mental hospital system, which took shape in the late 19th century, was extravagantly heralded as a cheap and humane solution for the problem of mental illness. But this high hope proved unjustified: the mental hospital merely became a repository for increasing numbers of social rejects whose subordination to hospital life was assured by rigid discipline and authoritarian organization. Strauss and his co-workers, in their book Psychiatric Ideologies and Institutions, demonstrate how the language of psychiatry provides an overarching metaphor of medical treatment which binds together the institutional apparatus of the mental hospital.

The American mental hospital, like any social institution, works within a framework of cu...