Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob.
- Massachusetts. Commission on Lunacy (1854)
- Date:
- 1971
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Insanity and idiocy in Massachusetts : report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 / by Edward Jarvis ; with a critical introduction by Gerald N. Grob. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![INTRODUCTION Mental illness, along with cancer and heart disease, ranks in the minds of many as one of the foremost health problems facing the American people. Statistics on the prevalence of mental disease are quite striking. At least half, if not more, of all hospital beds in the United States are now occupied by mental patients. A recent study of one area in New York City concluded that less than 20 percent of the population was mentally well.!~Aside from the human misery, the financial costs are staggering, for the direct and indirect costs stemming from mental illness run into the billions. By 1955 the problems arising out of mental disease had be- come so vast that the Congress unanimously endorsed the estab- lishment of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, empowering it to analyze the needs and resources of the mentally ill and to make recommendations for a national policy. Like many individuals within the mental health professions, the Commission began with an assumption about the past: namely, that American society had never allocated sufficient resources to extirpate or control mental illness and its consequences. Its final report, completed in 1961, opened with the strong and unequivocal assertion that the institutional system caring for the mentally ill in the United States was an abject and dismal failure. “Viewed either historically or currently,” it charged, “the care of persons voluntarily admitted or legally committed to public mental hospitals constitutes the great unfinished business of the mental health movement.’” '“Tn terms of Mental Health Rating II [the scale developed for the Midtown Manhattan Study]... less than one-fifth of the population is well, about three- fifths exhibit subclinical forms of mental disorder, and one-fourth shows some impairment and constitutes the clinical or morbid range of the scale.” Thomas S. Langner and Stanley T. Michael, Life Stress and Mental Health (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 76. ? Action for Mental Health: Final Report of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32232159_0013.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
