A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
It has led us from a cold dogma of blind heredity and a wholesale
fatalistic asylum scheme, to an understanding of individual, familiar,
and social adjustments, and a grasp on the factors which we can consider
individually and socially modifiable. We have passed from giving mere
wholesale advice to a conscientious study of the problems of each unit,
and at the same time we have developed a new and sensible approach to
mental hygiene and prevention, as expressed in the comprehensive surveys
of State and community work and even more clearly in the development of
helps to individuals in finding themselves, and in the work in schools
to reach those who need a special adaptation of aims and means. To the
terrible emergency of the war it was possible to bring experienced men
and women as physicians and nurses, and how much was done, only those
can appreciate who have seen the liberality with which all the
hospitals, and Bloomingdale among the first, contributed more than their
quota of help, and all the assistance that could possibly be offered to
returning victims for their readjustment.
It is natural enough that psychiatry should have erred in some respects.
We had forced upon us the herding together of larger numbers of patients
than can possibly be handled by one human working unit or working group.
The consequence was that there arose a narrowing routine and wholesale
classifications and a loss of contact with the concrete needs of the
individual case; that very often progress had to come from one-sided
enthusiasts or even outsiders, who lost the sense of proportion and
magnified points of relative importance until they were supposed to
explain everything and to be cure-alls. We are all inclined to sacrifice
at the altar of excessive simplicity, especially when it suits us; we
become "single-taxers" and favor wholesale legislation and exclusive
State care when our sense for democratic methods has gone astray. Human
society has dealt with the great needs of psychiatry about as it has
dealt with the objects of charity, only in some ways more stingily, with
a shrewd system and unfortunately often with a certain dread of the
workers themselves and of their enthusiasm and demands. Law and
prejudice surrounded a great share of the work with notions of stigma
and hopelessness and weirdness--while to those who see the facts in
terms of life problems there can be but few more inspiring tasks than
watching the unfolding of the problematic personality, seeking and
finding its proper settings, and preventing the clashes and gropings in
maladjustments and flounderings of fancy and the faulty use and
nutrition of the brain and of the entire organism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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