Psychiatric hospital
Some specialize in short-term or outpatient therapy for low-risk patients, while others provide long-term care for individuals requiring routine assistance or a controlled environment due to their psychiatric condition.
Modern psychiatric hospitals have evolved from the older concept of lunatic asylums, shifting focus from mere containment and restraint to evidence-based treatments that aim to help patients function in society.
A member of the Mercedarian Order named Juan Gilaberto Jofré traveled frequently to Islamic countries and observed several institutions that confined the insane.
Later on, physicians, including Philippe Pinel at Bicêtre Hospital in France and William Tuke at York Retreat in England, began to advocate for the viewing of mental illness as a disorder that required compassionate treatment that would aid in the rehabilitation of the victim.
[3][4] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychiatric institutions ceased using terms such as "madness", "lunacy" or "insanity", which assumed a unitary psychosis, and began instead splitting into numerous mental diseases, including catatonia, melancholia, and dementia praecox, which is now known as schizophrenia.
[15] In 1961, sociologist Erving Goffman described a theory[16][17] of the "total institution" and the process by which it takes efforts to maintain predictable and regular behavior on the part of both "guard" and "captor", suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role, in other words of "institutionalizing" them.
[citation needed] In America history in the 1980s after the "12,225,000 Acre Bill" it was emphasized that care would be given in asylums instead of housing the individuals in jails, poorhouses, or having them live on the streets.
Low acuity crisis facilities include peer respites, social detoxes, and other programs to serve individuals who are not actively suicidal/violent.
They are not used for acutely suicidal people; instead, the focus in these units is to make life as normal as possible for patients while continuing treatment to the point where they can be discharged.
However, there are a number of institutions specializing only in the treatment of juveniles, particularly when dealing with drug abuse, self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety, depression or other mental illnesses.
These units have the goal of treatment and rehabilitation to allow for transition back into society within a short time-frame, usually lasting two or three years.
These facilities provide assisted living[26] for an extended period of time for patients with mental illnesses, and they often aid in the transition to self-sufficiency.
These institutions are considered to be one of the most important parts of a mental health system by many psychiatrists, although some localities lack sufficient funding.
[28] Like the former Soviet Union and China, Belarus also has used punitive psychiatry toward political opponents and critics of current government in modern times.
[31][32] Community hospitals across the United States regularly discharge mental health patients, who are then typically referred to out-patient treatment and therapy.
[37] Historian Michel Foucault is widely known for his comprehensive critique of the use and abuse of the mental hospital system in Madness and Civilization.
It was a microcosm symbolizing the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values: relations of Family–Children (paternal authority), Fault–Punishment (immediate justice), Madness–Disorder (social and moral order).
[38][39] Erving Goffman coined the term "total institution" for mental hospitals and similar places which took over and confined a person's whole life.
[40]: 150 [41]: 9 Goffman placed psychiatric hospitals in the same category as concentration camps, prisons, military organizations, orphanages, and monasteries.
[42] In his book Asylums Goffman describes how the institutionalisation process socialises people into the role of a good patient, someone "dull, harmless and inconspicuous"; in turn, it reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness.
Franco Basaglia, a leading psychiatrist who inspired and planned the psychiatric reform in Italy, also defined the mental hospital as an oppressive, locked, and total institution in which prison-like, punitive rules are applied, in order to gradually eliminate its own contents.
Alongside the 1973 academic investigation by Rosenhan and other similar experiments, several journalists have been willingly admitted to hospitals in order to conduct undercover journalism.
These include mental status, self-care ability, responsible parties available, patients effect on environment, danger potential and the treatment prognosis.
