Product Description: In 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered an historic speech on mental illness and retardation. He described sweeping new programs to replace "the shabby treatment of the many millions of the mentally disabled in custodial institutions" with treatment in community mental health centers...read more

Documents more than three centuries of cures for madness, calling into question society's responsibilities to the mentally ill, what it means to be 'insane,' and what Americans value most about the human mind.

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In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, the foremost historian in the field compellingly recounts our various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma from colonial times to the present. Gerald Grob charts the growth of mental hospitals in response to the escalating numbers of the severely and persistently mentally ill and the deterioration of these hospitals under the pressure of too many patients and too few resources. Mounting criticism of psychiatric techniques such as shock therapies, drugs, and lobotomies and of mental institutions as inhumane places led to a new emphasis on community care and treatment. While some patients benefited from the new community policies, they were ineffective for many mentally ill substance abusers. Grob's definitive history points the way to new solutions. It is at once an indispensable reference and a call for a humane and balanced policy in the future.

Describing in horrifying detail the conditions she witnessed in jails, prisons, and asylums, a biography of Dorothea Dix documents her crusade to help the impoverished mentally ill by lobbying legislatures and soliciting funds that ultimately created thirty state asylums.

Product Description: The theoretical framework for the Quakers' care of the mentally ill emanated from a dynamic amalgam of theology, philosophy, psychology, and common sense, but the institutional use of moral treatment was an explicit outgrowth of their strong support systems...read more