Psychiatric hospital

Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, mental health units, mental asylums or simply asylums, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders, such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Services are based in psychiatric hospitals or in the community, and assessments are carried out by mental health professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers, using various methods such as psychometric tests but often relying on observation and questioning.

Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, mental health units, mental asylums or simply asylums, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders, such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Specialized hospitals include trauma centers, rehabilitation hospitals, children's hospitals, seniors' (geriatric) hospitals, and hospitals for dealing with specific medical needs such as psychiatric treatment (see psychiatric hospital) and certain disease categories.

Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, mental health units, mental asylums or simply asylums, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders, such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Involuntary treatment in a psychiatric hospital may be needed if a person is a risk to themselves or others but refuses treatment.

Patients are often admitted on a voluntary basis, but people whom psychiatrists believe may pose a significant danger to themselves or others may be subject to involuntary commitment.

Involuntary commitment or civil commitment (also known informally as sectioning or being sectioned in some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom) is a legal process through which an individual who is deemed by a qualified agent to have symptoms of severe mental disorder is ordered by a court into treatment in a psychiatric hospital (inpatient) or in the community (outpatient).

With successive waves of reform, and the introduction of effective evidence-based treatments, most modern psychiatric hospitals provide a primary emphasis on treatment, and attempt where possible to help patients control their own lives in the outside world, with the use of a combination of psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy.

It meant that more patients could be treated without the need for confinement in a psychiatric hospital.

Patients are often admitted on a voluntary basis, but people whom psychiatrists believe may pose a significant danger to themselves or others may be subject to involuntary commitment.

Voluntary commitment is the act or practice of a person admitting themself to a psychiatric hospital, or other mental health facility, voluntarily.

Western Europe would adopt these views later on with the advances of physicians like Philippe Pinel at the Bicêtre Hospital in France and William Tuke at the York Retreat in England.

Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 – 25 October 1826) was a French physician who was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy.

The development of the modern psychiatric hospital is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry.

An inpatient may be treated in a psychiatric hospital.

Western Europe would adopt these views later on with the advances of physicians like Philippe Pinel at the Bicêtre Hospital in France and William Tuke at the York Retreat in England.

Opened in 1796, it is famous for having pioneered the so-called "moral treatment" that became a behaviour model for asylums around the world with mental health issues.

An exception is in Japan, where many psychiatric hospitals still use physical restraints on patients, tying them to their beds for days or even months at a time.

The first public mental asylums were established in Britain; the passing of the County Asylums Act 1808 empowered magistrates to build rate-supported asylums in every county to house the many 'pauper lunatics'.

Notably, the Asylums Act established public mental asylums in Britain.

Those in the UK include Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, Rampton Secure Hospital in Retford, Nottinghamshire, and Scotland's The State Hospital in Carstairs.

Ashworth Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Maghull in Merseyside, England.

Those in the UK include Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, Rampton Secure Hospital in Retford, Nottinghamshire, and Scotland's The State Hospital in Carstairs.

Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in Berkshire, England.

These facilities, run by the National Health Service, provide psychiatric assessments and can also provide treatment and accommodation in a safe hospital environment where patients can be prevented from absconding.

For example, Northern Ireland has no high-security psychiatric hospitals and depends on hospitals in Great Britain, routinely at Carstairs hospital in Scotland for male patients and Rampton Secure Hospital in England for female patients.

Those in the UK include Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, Rampton Secure Hospital in Retford, Nottinghamshire, and Scotland's The State Hospital in Carstairs.

The State Hospital (also known as Carstairs Hospital, or simply Carstairs) is a psychiatric hospital near the village of Carstairs, in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.

Western Europe would adopt these views later on with the advances of physicians like Philippe Pinel at the Bicêtre Hospital in France and William Tuke at the York Retreat in England.

In its history it has been used successively and simultaneously as an orphanage, a prison, a lunatic asylum, and a hospital.

Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man have their own Medium and Low Secure units but use the mainland facilities for High Secure, to which smaller Channel Islands also transfer their patients as Out of Area (Off-Island Placements) Referrals under the Mental Health Act 1983.

The Lunacy Act 1845 and the County Asylums Act 1845 together gave mental hospitals or "asylums" the authority to detain "lunatics, idiots and persons of unsound mind".

The French historian Michel Foucault is widely known for his comprehensive critique of the use and abuse of the mental hospital system in Madness and Civilization.

The book developed out of Foucault's earlier writing on psychology, his own psychological difficulties, and his experiences working in a mental hospital, and was written mainly between 1955 and 1959 while working in cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Sweden (as director of a French cultural centre attached to the University of Uppsala), Germany, and Poland.

Asylums was a key text in the development of deinstitutionalization.

Deinstitutionalisation (or deinstitutionalization) is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability.

Modern psychiatric hospitals evolved from and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylum.

The rise of the lunatic asylum (or mental asylum) and its gradual transformation into, and eventual replacement by, the modern psychiatric hospital, explains the rise of organised, institutional psychiatry.

In 1961 sociologist Erving Goffman described a theory of the "total institution" and the process by which it takes efforts to maintain predictable and regular behavior on the part of both "guard" and "captor," suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role, in other words of "institutionalizing" them.

The book was one of the first sociological examinations of the social situation of mental patients in psychiatric hospitals and a major contribution to understanding of social aspects of mental illness.

The establishment of state mental hospitals in the U.S. is partly due to reformer Dorothea Dix, who testified to the New Jersey legislature in 1844, vividly describing the state's treatment of lunatics; they were being housed in county jails, private homes, and the basements of public buildings.

Involuntary treatments are among the many psychiatric practices which are questioned by the mental patient liberation movement.

Throughout, the class nature of mental hospitals, and their role as agencies of control, were well recognized.

In his book Asylums Goffman describes how the institutionalisation process socialises people into the role of a good patient, someone "dull, harmless and inconspicuous"; in turn, it reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness.

Based on his participant observation field work (he was employed as a physical therapist's assistant under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health at a mental institution in Washington, D.C.), Goffman details his theory of the "total institution" (principally in the example he gives, as the title of the book indicates, mental institutions) and the process by which it takes efforts to maintain predictable and regular behavior on the part of both "guard" and "captor," suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role, in other words of "institutionalising" them.

In clinical and abnormal psychology, institutionalization or institutional syndrome refers to deficits or disabilities in social and life skills, which develop after a person has spent a long period living in mental hospitals, prisons, or other remote institutions.