First Advisor

David Johnson

Term of Graduation

Spring 2024

Date of Publication

5-18-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in History

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

insane asylum, insanity, mental health, Oregon State Hospital, Oregon State Insane Asylum

Physical Description

1 online resource (vi, 141 pages)

Abstract

This thesis explores the lives of female patients at the Oregon State Insane Asylum between 1900 and 1910 and examines the significance of that decade as a period of transition in asylum care from a moral treatment model to a focus on moral hygiene practices to subvert insanity before it took root and medicalized psychiatric treatment for severe or chronic cases requiring institutionalization.

At the turn of the twentieth century, state insane asylums were in the aspirational early stages of transforming into specialized psychiatric and medical hospitals. Ultimately, the hoped-for transformation would not materialize in a meaningful way until well after 1910 as attempts at medicalization were hampered by the realities of the institutional asylum model. While widespread changes in hospital management and care were made, mostly after 1910, those changes did not ultimately have the anticipated curative effect.

Moral Treatment, the bedrock of nineteenth century mental health care, was designed to make the asylum itself a curative and therapeutic setting with superintendents, staff, and fellow patients acting as a proxy nuclear family. When it became clear that this model was not successful, in part because large-scale state institutions did not align with moral treatment as it was intended to function, mental health practitioners looked for a new path. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Progressive Era reforms moral hygiene was promoted as a preventive measure against new cases of insanity and asylums attempted to transform themselves into psychiatric hospitals.

The years 1900 to 1910 illustrate the earliest stages of this attempted transition, as the well-intentioned Superintendent Dr. J.F. Calbreath pushed for changes in an asylum hampered by size, cost, bureaucratic inefficiency, and a system designed to make the asylum a catchall for a wide range of mental and physical illnesses.

The lives of women at OSIA during this period offer another perspective on this period. Female patients at OSIA between 1900 and 1910 illustrate the gendered way in which insanity was identified, diagnosed, and treated. Fears of a transforming society and social landscape played a role in how mental illness was perceived and diagnosed in women and reflected in their treatment by their families, communities, and asylum staff. While the treatment of patients in these years wasn't radically different than those of women at the asylum in the last part of the nineteenth century, it foreshadows the more invasive medical treatments used to treat mental health after 1910.

Rights

© 2024 Rebekah Catherine Averette

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42433

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