Issues and characteristics related to asylums

When reading the book The Confinement of the insane: international perspectives, 1800-1965 by Porter Roy and David Wright, it is obvious that a number of the city asylums around the world are under research during the period from 19th century to late 20th. Some of these asylums focus on the unique characteristics due to their historical, cultural, economic, and geographic reasons, such as the Roddben Island Lunatic Asylum in South Africa, the Cery and Bel-Air asylums in Switzerland, and the Wittenauer Heilstatten in Germany; some focus on some certain related to the process of confinement, such as the South Carolina Luna Asylum in the United States, Victorian asylums in Australia and Parisian asylum. No matter what their focuses are, these asylums give me a lot of hints to examine the main issues and characteristics related asylums.

One issue is race-bias. Both the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum in South Africa and the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum in the United States concern with this issue. The Robben Island Lunatic Asylum located near to Cape Town, the capital city of Cape Colony in the 19th century, and this historical cause explained the different admission or diagnostic patterns for various racial groups. The tendency is that fewer black patients than white were admitted to Robben Island Asylum; greater medical concerned about white insanity and the stereotyped perception that black insanity was less complex. As to the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum in the United States, the large black and slave population made race a much more significant issue.

The second issue is police. the Victorian asylums in Australia is a classic example to the understanding this. The purpose of the European immigrants to Australia was to set up a penal colony and police played an important part in the confinement of the insane from its very beginning. The existence of police guaranteed the committals within the communities to be sent to the asylum according to the statutes and courts, and kept the lunatics on trial release from the asylum under surveillance. The judgement of police is influenced greatly by culture, gender and race and foreigner were usually considered to be insane. And in Victorian Canada, a big number of Irish were considered to be insane.

Another is gender. In the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, male patients under detention dominated constantly in number, because men were generally considered to be more violent than women, and another reason was due to the large number of criminals transfered from prison to the asylum were men. In Victorian Australia in the latter part of the 19th century, the potential disorder of women's sexual difference created some police anxiety and significant numbers of women were considered to be insane. In Canada, Ontario asylums conformed to the colonial patter that male patients occupied a significantly high number in the first two decades, and then a rebalancing by female patients. The length of stay and transformation is inclined that women stayed a longer period than man. Other aspects, such as etilogical factor, diagnostic patterns, admission passages, are also different from the male insane.