Perspectives

“In Halifax County... a maniac was confined in the jail; shut in the dungeon, and chained there. The jail was set on fire by other prisoners: the keeper, as he told me, heard frantic shrieks and cries of the madman, and ‘might have saved him as well as not, but his noise was a common thing he was used to it, and thought nothing out of the way was the case.’.... He perished in agony, and amidst tortures no pen can describe” (“Dorothea Dix Pleads for a State Mental Hospital”).

Keepers at this hospital, similar to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, were responsible for watching over the patients and ensuring their safety. This keeper feels guilt for not being able to save a patient he was responsible for as he didn't recognize the man's screams as screams for help because he was so used to the patients just making similar noises. 

Citizens started to realize that the current mental hospitals were doing more harm than good. They didn’t like the asylums because they were just to keep mentally ill people out of society, and not to rehabilitate them back into the world.

“‘Were our law-makers doomed to listen for a single hour each day to the clanking of chains, and the piercing shrieks of these forlorn wretches, relief would surely follow, and the character of our State would be rescued from the foul blot that now dishonors it’” (“Dorothea Dix Pleads for a State Mental Hospital”).

A patient at a similar asylum to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum wondered if the higher ups had seen how patients are treated in the hospitals and experienced it for themselves they would change the laws to something similar to the present laws.

“There I found the infirm, afflicted mother, and the insane son. Amidst tears and sighs she recounted to me her troubles, and as she wept she said, ‘the Lord above only knows my troubles, and what a heap of sorrow I have had in my day, and none to give me help. There he lay, in the jail, cold and distressed, mightily misused; if I could have got money to send him off to where they care such spells, for they do say crazy folks can be cured, I should have had him in my old age to take care of me, but I am poor and always was, and there is no help here. Ah well, many and many is the long night I am up with him and no sleep or rest, anyhow; this cant last always; I shall die, and I dont know what is to come of him then’” (“Dorothea Dix Pleads for a State Mental Hospital”).

The mother of a mentally ill patient at a similar asylum doesn’t like the idea of her kid being there. She knows he needs help but she does not have the financial means to send him to a hospital that might actually help, or cure him, as she puts it. The mother knows the next time she will see her son is in the afterlife.

“For assuring public and private safety, his family have adopted the only alternative of confining him upon their own farm, rather than seeing him thrown into the dungeon of the County jail. Of these two evil conditions, I confess, I see no choice. The family though enjoying the means of decent livelihood, when unburthened by extra expenses, have not the means of sending him to a distant Hospital” (“Dorothea Dix Pleads for a State Mental Hospital”).

This family would rather have their mentally ill loved one be locked away in shambles in a barn than send him to an asylum. They know how bad the asylums are and don’t have the money to send him either.

“They had been chained day and night to their bedsteads, and kept in a state so filthy that it was sickening to go near them. -- They were usually restrained by the strait-waistcoat, and with collars round their necks, the collars being fastened with chains or straps to the upper part of the bedstead, to prevent, it was said their tearing their clothes. The feet were fastened with iron leg-locks and chains” (“Dorothea Dix Pleads for a State Mental Hospital”).

A doctor at a similar asylum to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum talks about the horrors she had to see on a daily basis for her job. This doctor obviously thinks these conditions, such as being chained to beds, wearing strait-waistcoats, and wearing collars, are inhumane and feels bad for her past patients.