Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

The Continued Struggle to Treat Mental Illness in America

The Rise of Institutionalization and Moral Treatment

“Plate 8 (Tom Rakewell Ends up in the Bethlehem Hospital Madhouse),” engraving by William Hogarth, 1735. Courtesy of the RISD Museum.

Title page from Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution near York, 1813. Via the Wellcome Collection.

(top) Floorplan of the Northern Illinois Hospital for the Insane. From Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World... (bottom) Aerial view of the Northern Illinois Hospital for the Insane. From Tucker, Lunacy in Many Lands...

Frontispiece showing "Types of Insanity." From Bucknill and Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine..., 1879.

Shifting Narratives on Child and Adolescent Mental Illness

Brierre de Boismont, A. “On the Insanity of Early Life.” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 10, no. 8 (1857): 622.

(l) “Concert for the Benefit of the Juvenile Court.” Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago. (r) Jane Addams. “The Bad Boy of the Street.” Ladies’ Home Journal 26 (October 1909): 17.

Healy Pictorial Completion Test I, circa 1912. From Galter Library Special Collections.

Kanner, “The Psychopathological Problems of Childhood,” in Practical Clinical Psychiatry, 1940, 613. From Galter Library collections.

Treatments In and Out of Hospitals

Davis & Kidder's Patent Magneto-Electric Machine for Nervous Disease, circa 1854. From Galter Library Special Collections.

(l) Ives, Electricity as a Medicine, and its Mode of Application, 1887. From Galter Library Special Collections. (r) Harlow, Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar Through the Head, 1869. Via the National Library of Medicine

Freeman and Watts, Psychosurgery: Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Mental Disorders, 1942. Via HathiTrust.

Abbott Laboratories, Abbott, Servant to Medicine, 1938. Via HathiTrust.

“Materials Available on Mental Health.” In Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, 1961. From Galter Library collections.

(l) Advertisement for Thorazine. In Neurology, 1956. From Galter Library collections. (r) Librium, Metrazol, and Nembutal. From Galter Library Special Collections (2018.05.006).

Chicago’s Approach to Mental Illness

Pilsen Little-Village Community Mental Health Center flyer. Tracy Baim Editorial Files, Alexander Street Press. LGBT Thought and Culture Database.

Report of the City-State-Community Mental Health Task Force, 1972. Personal copy of Harold J. Visotsky, MD. Director, Illinois State Department of Mental Health, 1963-69; Chair, Department of Psychiatry, Northwestern University Medical School, 1969-1991.

Collaborative for Community Wellness. “911 Behavioral Health Call Rates across Chicago’s Wards: Understanding Call Rates in the Context of Disinvestment in Public Mental Health Services.” January 1, 2022.

From Road Runners: The Role and Impact of Law Enforcement in Transporting Individuals with Severe Mental Illness, a National Survey. 2019. Via Treatment Advocacy Center.

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