Something fascinating about the rapid increase in psychiatric hospitalisation in Sweden + stuff about how the demise of the three tier family may be part of the problem of the rise of dominance of psychiatry

This is a snip from an excellent response to the discussion about the CRPD and the repeal of mental health laws

"
One common misbelief - also within the user/survivor movement - is that the big, prison-like, psychiatric institutions (asylums, madhouses) are something very old, and an expression of a very antiquated understanding of persons with psychosocial disabilities - but they are on the contrary a very modern phenomenon. Of course, madhouses have existed for a couple of centuries, but earlier they were very rare. It was only 50 years ago that they rose into a widespread phenomenon, with a huge number of mad persons incarcerated. Here are some approximate figures of how many psychiatric patients were incarcerated in mental hospitals in Sweden at various times: in 1850 there were about 800 psychiatric patients incarcerated in the whole country, in the year 1900 this had rised slowly to about 1.000, in the 1920's it was about 4.000, and at it's peak, in 1967, it was 37.000!
"

My initial response to reading this was "bloody hell!" because..well...what the fuck? In the space of about half a century the rate of detention in a psychiatric acility rose significantly.

I wonder why? And what happened in other countries. Perhaps it is the effect of the power of psychiatry and the public's acceptance of their power which allowed this? Or perhaps it was another factor? This period of time is also associated with the rapid advance of the model of the Industrial Age which affected the culture of many developed world nations.

Bloody hell. In 2 decades the rate of detention in psychiatric wards rose 4 fold. In half a century it rose 9 times in Sweden (a country which does a lot of measuring of the population).

I wonder what the reasons were for people to be hospitalised. I suspect they changed as psychiatry patholgoised ever larger swathes of the diverse human race, deeming extreme difference as a reason for incarceration and normalisation. Each generation of people and psychatrists pursued progress as the ever widening of the definition of mental disorder...then came the invention of psychiatric drugs. It was 1952 or 1954 when the FDA in America approved...chloromazapine or something...and this began the next Great Confinement of madness;;;;and allowed the patholgisation of human difference to spead ever-wider but also to be accepted more by the populous.

During this time there was also the breakdown of the 3-tier family unit which was replaced by the 2-tier "nuclear family. Elders were removed from the family during the latter 20th century. I wonder if this is cause, effect or irrelevant? They had the memory of the times before. They had the wisdom which their offspring were yet to learn. By removing them and their value within the family and within society perhaps this may have shifted the perceived value to psychiatry. What I mean is...well...our elders play an important role in our upbringing and without them the people turned to psychiatry to fulfil their role.

The elderly are also pretty mad. I think that's part of the reason dementia praecox had that term. Dementia looked like madness. By removing the elderly the people in 2-tier family units were not familiarised with madness or dementia.

This is sort of why social contact theory is relevant to healing the illness in society. Many effects and many processes meant madness (and other social disabilities) became deemed abhorrent because people stopped experiencing it in their daily lives. Evermore natural human behaviours became pathologised because people forgot what it is to be human. They became enamoured with the idea of being an automoton as progress in society.

Then electronic engineers built robots and computer scientists designed intelligent systems. The automoton is becoming less valuable and the mad (and other people with so-called disabilities) are becoming the new valued type of human being.