6. Patients Were Treated Like Prisoners
The interchangeable use of patient, inmate, and prisoner in this list is no mistake. Patients of early 20th century asylums were treated like prisoners of a jail. From the dehumanizing and accusatory admissions protocols to the overcrowding and lack of privacy, the patients were not treated like sick people who needed help. Instead, they were treated like dangerous animals in need of guarding. The public knew the ill-treatment well enough that the truly mentally ill often attempted to hide their conditions to avoid being committed. The idea of being involuntarily committed was also used as a threat.
Nellie Bly wrote of the prison-like environment of Bellevue asylum in New York, saying, “I could not sleep, so I lay in bed picturing to myself the horrors in case a fire should break out in the asylum. Every door is locked separately, and the windows are heavily barred so that escape is impossible. In the one building alone there are, I think Dr. Ingram told me, some 300 women. They are locked, one to ten in a room. It is impossible to get out unless these doors are unlocked.” Bly’s fears would be realized in 1947 when ten women, including the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda, died in a fire at an asylum.