n-like" cells running along the ravine and fitted with small doors; one at the
Photo: Camden Co. Historical Soc.
|Nineteenth-century reformer and pioneer for the rights of the insane, Dorothea Dix railed against conditions in Blackwood's 'mad house.' Larger|
top facilitated the passage of food to the inmate; the one at the bottom was used to clean out debris and replace straw bedding. It's easy to imagine how similiar these crude rooms were to animal pens in a stable. Though the poorhouse itself was enlarged by the county several times, the mad house and its ravine shacks remained the only option for the mentally ill for almost 40 years.
In 1878, freeholders approved construction of a "lunatic asylum" adjoining the poorhouse. The three-story brick structure, designed to house 90 patients would, according to the freeholders, provide "all the best modern appliances for the care of the insane."
Evolving psychiatric science
The most disturbed patients were housed in confinement cages on the ground floor; the second floor was for the less disturbed; and the third floor would house the asylum's steward
Photo: Camden Co. Historical Soc.
|Blackwood's facilities were repeatedly expanded and modernized in the 20th century into what became known as the Camden County Insane Hospital at Lakeland. It was torn down in the 1980s. Larger|
or matron and their families. This was at a time when the superintendent earned $800/year and the weekly cost to house a patient was $1.50. This new facility was known as the Camden County Insane Asylum at Blackwood.
Over the next 47 years, additions and improvements were made to the original brick structure until, by 1925, the asylum had grown to include a nurses' residence; an admission building where new patients were examined and observed; and a service bridge across the ravine connecting the old brick asylum to the new admission building. At the same time, Timber Creek was dammed, providing a scenic lake and giving the facility its new name: The Camden County Insane Hospital at Lakeland.
Strange early treatments
Along with improvements to the physical structures that housed them, care for the mentally ill gradually began to shift from strictly custodial to therapeutic, with treatments running the gamut from the simply bizarre to the truly horrific.
For instance, in the late 18th century, Philadelphia's Dr. Benjamin Rush, -- considered the founding father of American psychiatry
Photo: Hoag Levins
|Dr. Benjamin Rush's 'Tranquilizer' chair. Larger|
-- invented two curious "therapeutic" devices. His "Tranquilizer" chair was designed to, in Dr. Rush's words, "keep maniacs in the inflammatory stage of their disease perpendicular... so as to save the head from the impetus of the blood as much as possible." The second, called the "Gyrator," placed the patient on a board, head outward like a spoke on a wheel, then rotated the board at high speed, sending blood racing to the head to supposedly relieve a congested brain.
At the other end of the spectrum were electroconvulsive therapy -- shock therapy -- that delivered a series of
Photo: National Archives
|Typical of the 19th- and early 20-century treatments for insanity that now seem unscientific or even bizarre was the wrapping of patients in wet sheets. They were then laid out in neat rows. Larger|
electric shocks across the head to produce convulsions designed to improve the symptoms of schizophrenia, and the barbaric lobotomy, which severed the fibers connecting the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain -- sometimes using tools as crude as an ice pick and a hammer.
Eventually, more modern facilities like Lakeland and the new Ancora began to add counseling, as well as occupational, recreational, industrial and physical therapy, to their treatment programs at about the same time a new class of drugs -- the antipsychotics -- hit the market. By the mid-1950s, with 560,000 Americans hospitalized for various forms of mental illness, Thorazine had become so popular manufacturers couldn't keep up with demands. From then on, psychotropic agents with names liter