“Ten Days in a Mad-House” is a story of a girl that gets taken to an assign asylum for being supposedly insane. There she discovers the horrors of being in an assign asylum. She describes her ten days of horrific events that happen behind the closed doors of the institution. She discovers that being in an assign asylum is like being a prisoner. By looking at the effects of dehumanization in assign asylums in the late eighteenth and early-mid nineteenth century, we can understand that patients were treated like objects and not people.

It is important to understand what an asylum is and why women were put there.  Assign asylums in the late eighteenth and early.mid nineteenth century were places that family members or husbands brought women that were considered insane. Women that were brought into asylums were not actually mentally insane. In the nineteenth century, the definition of insane was not the same as it is today. Today, mental insane women have diagnosed diseases. Back then, they did not have the necessary information and medical study to understand what insanity was.  Women were considered insane if they defied there husbands, engaged in any sort of learning or reading, tried to be independent, had any sort of physical illness, were depressed, had anxiety, and/or showed any trait that was considered not normal or strange. Families would either store there mentally insane relatives in the attic of there homes or at assign asylums. Asylums were often considered prisons. Instead of focusing on making a patient better, they were commonly considered a holding place for women; sometimes women were there for a life time.

There are many ways that the assign asylums dehumanized there patients. The first way was the lack of food that they offered there patients. The average person is supposed to get 2000 calories a day with at least one serving of each food group, protein, fruit, vegetable, grain, and dairy. It is very important to eat healthy nutritious meals in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle and be physically well. In the assign asylums they gave their patients hardly this. As stated in ten days in a mad house, they gave their patients meals that were not anywhere close to the expectable amount of calories or nutrition.  For example, meal one: small bowl with five prunes, pinkish looking stuff that was supposed to be cup of tea, and sketchy buttered bread, meal two: fresh fish just boiled in water with no salt or pepper or butter with mutton and  potatoes without the faintest seasoning, meal three: dirty, black colored bread with a spider in it, oatmeal with molasses, and cold tea. These meals were not only lacking nutritional value and proper calorie amount, but they were disgusting. Some patients could not stomach it and were forced to eat it by the nurse. These institutions thought it would be a good idea to feed  so called “sick” patients gross food to try and make them better. These gross meals were in contrast to the delicious meals that the workers and doctors were given with fresh fruit and meats. This is extremely dehumanizing to the patients because they are being treated like they are experiments, not people. They are being denied a right to eat and looked down on. The way they were treated reminds one to nazi concentration camps during World War two. Similar to the camp, they were all filled into a large room, were patients ran violently to their food in fear of not having enough, stealing others and were told to shut up if they asked for more or better food. Then, they were filled back into a locked room and had no control of where they could go. 

In addition, patients were being dehumanized by having to strip their identity. Some institutions gave a patient a number. This is so dehumanizing because they are taking away your name that was given to you at birth. It makes you seem like an object and not a human being. They also strip there patients of their own clothes and force them to wear uniforms that are identical. This garment consisted of a “underskirt made of coarse dark cotton goods and a cheap white calico does with a black spot on it” (Bly 289).  This outfit was ugly and extremely cold. Can you even imagine wearing that in the winter and how cold it would be. When patients asked for more clothing they were told no and said to shut up and stop asking. Nurses and Doctors did not care if patients were cold. This is another case were people were thought of as an object. Objects do not get cold, but people do. This is also very similar to the nazi concentration camps because they were force to wear numbers and had to wear striped pajamas to show they were jews. Lastly, patients lost their identity because they lost control of there free will. For example, they were not only forced to eat food, but they were forced to bathe in cold water. Nurses scrubbed them, rinsed them, and combed their hair like they are babies. If patients refused they would scrub harder. This shows that patients were thought of as stupid living creatures that can not bathe themselves and are not sensitive to water temperature. When in reality, most women in the asylums were capable of bathing themselves and are extremely sensitive to cold water. The fact that they did not take the time or care to make sure there patients had warm water shows that they do not care about there patients health at all.

Next, assign asylums dehumanized there patients by confining them. When you are checking into this asylum it is like being checked into a prison. Patients are basically treated like prisoners and objects. They are put into a room with a small bed and locked in there every night. During the day where ever they are, the doors are locked behind them, whether they are eating, bathing, or in holding. Holding is probably the most dehumanizing thing there is because they expect sick, tired patients to sit up on hard benches for hours upon hours of every day without any interactions, reading, or source to the outside world. Being confined can make these patients even more insane then they actually are. Imagine if you had nothing to do all day and on top of that were cold, tired, had bad food, and were treated poorly. This is a big problem in the assign asylums. Taking in women that were not even insane to begin with and making them insane by the harsh treatment at the facility. Confining patients shows dehumanization because they do not care about the well being or comfort of a patient. They think they need to lock patients up, preventing them from escaping, but they are not realizing the effects of  confinement. Confinement can cause patients to get even crazier, most people do not respond well to it. This is why today there is still a controversy if prisoners should be able to be solitary confined for long periods of time because it causes negative health effects mentally and physically. 

Finally,  assign asylums dehumanized there patients by torturing them. There are many forms of torture in assign asylums. When patients are not doing what they are told, nurses beat them, choke them, or put them in a straight jacket. This is dehumanization because they treating patients like an animal. When a horse does not run fast enough you whip it, when a patient does not listen you do not choke it. This again shows that nurses did not care about patients feelings or well being. Physically hurting someone is going to make them more upset and cause them to disobey more. 

In conclusion, the way patients were treated was awful and dehumanized in the asylums. Luckily, today assign asylums are a lot different. They feed there patients right, treat there patients with more respect, and have better conditions. Today, they also have the correct medical information and help. They have professional psychologists to help patients. They also have doctors and nurses and that are trained to work with patients with a mental disease. Additionally, the people being checked into a mental institution is a lot different today then it was back then. This is important because we are no longer checking women into an asylum that do not need to be. Overall, it is important to understand and remember assign asylums in the nineteenth century, so we do not dehumanize women again in the future.
