
 Insane Asylums were originally built as the savior for people with a mental disability, however in Nellie Bly’s, “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, people on the outside are given a unique examination of what went wrong. In the early 1800’s asylums provided people with diagnosed mental disability a home were they could be taken care of by professional care. However, professionals took advantage of the vulnerability of patients, forcing them to accept their insanity and treat it through torture. These asylums soon became home to lots of people that were not sick at all, but merely incontinent for society. When doctors didn’t see improvement to these patient’s behavior, the severity of treatments was increased. These treatments were meant to break patients down and degrade them, not only through physical torture but psychologically and chemically. During this time Bly experienced first-hand what these treatments truly did to patients in insane asylums, even describing the asylums as a concentration camp. As a result of treatments and neglect of duty most patients left in worse conditioned than when they entered the asylums, and many did not leave at all.

In the mid 1800’s people being diagnosed with mental disabilities increased exponentially. Doctors admitted patients into the asylum with illness such as loss of property, death of friends, injury of head, and fright. It was easy to get in, but impossible to leave. Family members would have their own children or parents convicted to these asylums because they didn’t want to have to deal with them. The homeless were scraped off the streets and locked in up in insane asylums. Even a sane person like Nellie Bly convinced four doctors that she was insane and needed to be placed in an insane asylum. It was this unawareness that caused new insane asylums to be built to deal with the increase of patients. These buildings did not always meet regulations and supervisors for these patients were not able to provide adequate care for each patient. Insane asylums did not have the budget to provide acceptable living conditions but the government was unwilling to revise their estimate. Dinners consisted of one tablespoon “for the soup, and a piece of bread” as the entrée, butter was “never allowed at dinner nor coffee or tea” (Bly 292). Rooms were small, dirty, dark, and isolated away from the other patients. Windows were locked and barred with no chance to escape and each building held around 300 women. The asylums were not very different for males and females and treatment did not differ much. While men could endure the harsher treatment, there was often less care for women. Bly even describes that in the case of a fire “jailors or nurses would never think of releasing their crazy patients… not a dozen women could escape. All would be left to roast to death” (Bly 288). Even attendants to the insane called it a disgrace wrote Lee-Ann Monk, in her article “Working in the Asylum: Attendants to the insane.” With patients outnumbering attendants heavily, adequate care could not possibly be provided. However, these patients were treated with the neglect that rivals only prisoners. “On bathing day the tub is filled with water and the patients are washed, one after the other, without a change of water” describes Bly (Bly as cited in Popova). Attendants were even so lazy as to make the patients use the same towel for everyone. However, when a visitor came, attendants would hurry to change her dress as to appear as though she was being cared for. It was this lack of concern for patients that caused them to never get better.

While care was inadequate, treatment would be considered torture in today’s society. Originally patients were treated with The Moral Treatment, which includes leaving their friends and family to live in the Insane Asylum. They would change their daily lifestyle, eat healthy, exercise daily, and meet with the superintendent. However, these treatments were soon replaced with harsher treatments when patient’s behavior did not change. These new treatments included hydrotherapy, which was a fancy word for water boarding patients, isolation, and physical restraints. These treatments overtime caused patients to have mental breakdowns and promoted new treatments. Blueprints and plans on exactly what to do with insane patients was created and outlined by Carla Yanni in the article, “The Linear Plan for Insane Asylums in the United States before 1866.” It was a concentration camp before concentration camp existed. People were being tortured and humiliated because they were different from everyone else similar to what the Nazi’s did. There were not only taking insane patients and making them more insane but taking patients like Nellie Bly who was perfectly sane and making her “sit from 6 A.M. until 8 P.M. on straight-back benches” not allowing her to “talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane” (Bly 293). Supervisors had become so blind as to think that people not acting insane were hiding it and needed to be pushed to the edge to unleash their insanity. When Nellie was accepted into the Blackwell insane asylum she started acting normal again, but “yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be” (Bly as cited in Popova). This paradox was true for many patients and the ones the abstained would soon be convinced they were insane.

“For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally so that I will never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet and, throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. At other times they took hold of my ears and beat my head on the floor and against the wall. Then they pulled my hair out by the roots so that it will never grow in again” (Collison as cited in Popova). 

In this moment Nellie Bly experiences torture that would make even some terrorists crack. This was the treatment that patients endured daily living in insane asylums. They had no choice but to comply with nurses or they might risk even more extreme torture. While, the physical torture wears down the body, it was the mental and chemical torture that destroys it. Non-obedient patients were subject to daily injections of morphine and chloral followed by hours and even days of isolation. It becomes obvious why most people never got better and eventually killed themselves if the treatment had not already. 

Nellie Bly only spent 10 days in this hell hole, but reading story after story of treatment and living conditions had people ready to pronounce the staff and supervisors as insane not the patients. While these patients with real mental disabilities needed help, insane asylums provided them with the exact opposite. When staff “had gotten all the amusement out of her they wanted and she was crying, they began to scold and tell her to keep quiet. She grew more hysterical every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion” (Bly 297). These treatments cannot be accepted anywhere especially a mental institution. While most of the responsibility falls on the staff, doctors had the obligation of pronouncing these people as insane. They were blind in realizing that just because they were different from others doesn’t make them insane. This story feels more like a nightmare with each visualization of treatments, and these stories are only over a 10-day period in one asylum. Insane asylums lasted over 80 years, until Bly’s act of courage. Bly forced many changes, including raising the budget to around $1 million, which is close to $25 million in today’s economy. It was this change that created better treatments and conditions for mental institutions. No longer neglected, patients had the possibility of becoming better and rejoining society better than when they left it.
