who revolutionized moral management in the treatment of mental patients in the l

Insanity in colonial America was not pretty: emotional torment, social isolation, physical pain—and these were just the treatments! In the late 1700s facilities and treatments were often crude and barbaric; however, this doesn’t mean that those who applied them were fueled by cruelty. There were often dedicated and intelligent individuals behind the torturers’ masks. How can this be? Prevailing thoughts on the etiology of mental illness and political forces played large roles in how patients were treated. An excellent example of this is the story of North America’s first public mental health hospital: the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds in Williamsburg, Va.

Prior to the opening of the mental health hospital in 1773, the prevailing goal was to minimize the trouble caused to the community by the mentally ill. The quietly insane were simply left to their own devices in the countryside. Those who committed crimes, caused a nuisance or posed a potential threat of either, though, were subject to imprisonment in the local jail.

Virginia’s Acting-Royal Governor and Chief Administrative Officer Francis Fauquier (1758-1768) struggled with the legality of imprisoning the innocent, as well as the lack of treatment for them. Publicly run hospitals specifically for the insane had been in practice for a century in France and England. Fauquier proposed a similar idea to be implemented on American soil.