Up until the early 1900s mental illnesses were always seen with a negative connotation. Today mental illnesses are embraced by people and are treated with therapy and many different types of medicine. In the mid-1800s, when Ten Days in a Mad House was written, mental illnesses were frowned upon. The main character Tillie Mayard, who is an undercover journalist, goes into a mad house for 10 days to uncover the truth of what goes on behind its closed doors. Tillie shows how madhouses did not treat their patients right.

The story starts with Tillie going to a mad house and being examined by nurses and doctors. While entering the Mad House, the main character discovers that no visitors are allowed. Tillie experiences harsh conditions starting from being forces into an ice cold bath in front of many women and is scrubbed with a “large, discolored rag” (286).  The night proceeded with the Tillie being locked in a room being forced to sleep in a freezing room with wet hair.  Tillie often mentions how rude the nurses were in the mad house and example of this is when the nurses, who were making fun of an old German women, “seemed to find a great deal of amusement in teasing the harmless old soul” (297).  The days went on with patients being forced to eat gross food and receiving bad treatment from the nurses.

The article, “Mental Illness: From Skull Drills to Happy”, by Allison Foershner, talks about why from approximately the 1500s to the mid-1800s, people were placed in Mad Houses. People believed that to get rid of a mental illness people must regularly attend church and take a pilgrimage. If they did not receive God’s mercy they would be sent to a mad house. In 1406 CE, the first “Mad House” in Spain opened. Because there were so many people inside the institutions, they had terrible living conditions and patients would receive cruel abuse. The Mad Houses would be staffed with untrained, unqualified individuals who treated the patients as animals. There were no visitors allowed to the cells except food delivers and the rooms were never cleaned. Patients would sleep on small amounts on straw on the floor and to “cure” the patients, they would be submerged into hot or ice-cold water to shock their minds from the normal state. They also used leeches, hoping they would suck the bad blood out of patients. In a different house in Paris in 1792, some patients were cured. They took the opposite approach by being kind and taking the patients’ needs into considerations. In Lagos and Abeokuta conditions were less pleasant than Paris. The cells were “dark, overcrowded, lacked supplies, poor bathing facilities, and they would chain the patients to restrain them” (Foershner,1). Patients receive very little occupational therapy while at the institution. Many institutions did not test their patients to see what made them crazy. No person had a specific kind of treatment to help then so everyone was tortured the same way.

In another article called “1774 Madhouse ACT”, The author Sheilagh Holmes talks about what the act for regulating Madhouses in 1774. In contrast to people being treated to therapy today, people were treated through therapy but back in the 1800s with “asylums [that] were merely reformed penal institutions where the mentally ill were abandoned by relatives or sentenced by the law and faced a life of inhumane treatment, all for the sake of lifting the burden off ashamed families and preventing any possible disturbance in the community” (Holmes 2). Until 1774 when the Madhouse act was passed, there was no law stating what mad houses could do. “Consequently, numerous private madhouses became subject to public scandals, accused of horrific abuses, malpractices, and patient mistreatment” (Holmes 1). Although this act was passed, many Madhouses continued to not treat their patients right and remained bad conditions. 

Both articles relate to the actions that were done in Ten Days in a Mad House. The articles talked about the living conditions in many different mad houses between 1500s and 1800s. Many conditions related to the story such as the uncomfortable living situations (cold bed/ floor) and the poor bathing facilities. This related to Tillie Mayards’ experience in the mad house when they forcefully washed her with a discolored cloth that they used on all the patients. They also made Tillie sleep in an uncomfortable outfit with wet hair in the freezing room. The article talks about the horrible conditions in the mad houses relating and how they were not safe. This relates to Tillie Mayards point when she goes to talk to the doctor about how it in unsafe to lock the patients in at night because in a case of a fire they would not be able to get out. The point of the analysis is to prove how badly treated the patients in these institutions were. People were placed in these houses for random reasons like not believing in god or not looking “normal”. As time progressed, mental illnesses have known as something that can be cured through medicine and therapy. In contrast, during the 1800s Mentally ill people were a threat and had to be isolated from other to not damage anyone else.

Madhouses were used as a place to take people with mental illnesses before the 1900s. Patients were abused and forced to do things against their own will. Ten Days in a Mad House uncovered the truth about what happens in Madhouses when a journalist Tillie Mayards decided to voluntarily go in one undercover. As time went on, mental illnesses have been accepted and treated with things such as medication and therapy.
