The Divergence of Mental Illness in the Late 19th Century

The late 19th century saw a rapid decline of the state of asylums in Great Britain. The image of the grand, impressive asylum was now one of decaying grandeur. I find this backwards progress to be very intriguing and baffling, because the field of mental medicine had come so far in the previous few decades. However, a few factors of the time led to the downward spiral of psychiatry, including asylum overcrowding, the emergence of a Darwinian perspective on mental illness, and increasing pessimism and ambivalence toward the progress and modernity of the era.

The idea that humans are descended from beasts took its toll on the practice of psychiatry at the time. Madness was now thought to be inherited and incurable, a manifestation of the “beast within” rising to the surface of a person’s character. Interestingly, mental illness diagnoses diverged along class lines at the time, with low-class criminals being characterized as “degenerate,” and the wealthier insane classified by the less-harsh term “neurotic.”

The explanation of degeneracy is easily understood in a cultural context; Max Nordau wrote in 1892 about how the rapid modernization of Victorian England brought with it an ugly underbelly of crime and insanity. There was a movement towards studying the physiognomy of criminals, in an attempt to discern some underlying physical characteristic that demonstrated the degeneration of an individual.

On the other side of the class divide, the diagnosis of “bad nerves” became much more common with the development of the field of neurology. The wealthy and upper-class could avoid a stay in an asylum if they were merely “neurotic.” This “epidemic of bad nerves,” as Professor Harrington called it in class, can also be clearly attributed to modernization and the new culture of hurry, worry, and technology. It is very interesting to me that psychologists and neurologists at the time seemed to have understood the cultural roots of these diseases, but characterized them in such different ways for the different classes.