Types of Mental Illness | Quakers & Mental Health

As the nineteenth century progressed, physicians responded to mental illness in increasingly systematic ways. At first, physicians at Friends’ Asylum classified patients by the duration of their insanity, as experts held that the longer a person was deprived of the use of their reason, the less likely they were to recover. In 1836, Friends’ Asylum began to also classify patients based on the type of insanity they were thought to have, as deduced from their symptoms. Mania was thought to be the most curable and dementia the least (Esquirol 128). Physicians also began recording the causes of mental illness for each patient if they were known. The classification schemes employed by Friends' Asylum doctors illustrate the variety of factors thought to cause mental illness, as well as the ways that physicians attempted to make sense of the wide range of symptoms that patients exhibited. Although Friends' Asylum did not base patients’ ward assignments on these diagnoses like at other institut

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