Short-Term
How did other asylums change in the months following the closing of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, 1994?
"Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and California all have effective deinstitutionalization rates of over 95 percent” (“Deinstitutionalization: A Psychiatric ‘Titanic’”).
Deinstitutionalization is to remove (care, therapy, etc.) from the confines of an institution by providing treatment, support, or the like through community facilities. In this context, 8 US states have over 95% of closing down mental institutions rates.
Long-Term
How did asylums change in the decades after the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum closing down, and into the present?
“The 1990 American with Disabilities Act (ADA) made it illegal to discriminate against people based on disability. In the 1990 Olmstead ruling, the Supreme Court said the ADA made it illegal to segregate people with mental health conditions in inpatient institutions when they could be safely treated outside of them” (Hairston).
Obviously, life already sucked in the mental hospitals just for having a mental illness, something that you can't really help, but imagine also being physically different, something you literally cannot help. Mental institutions treated people with physical and mental disabilities worse than people with just mental disabilities, so this act changed a lot for the better.
“Modern psychiatric hospitalization often focuses on getting a person stabilized on the right medications. Inpatient mental health treatment typically also includes group and individual therapy and therapeutic activities like art classes, exercise, and social and recreational activities. Discharge planning begins the day a person is admitted” (Do Insane Asylums Still Exist? The Surprising Past and Present).
“Psychiatric hospitals now specialize in acute treatment and stabilization. This means they discharge patients as soon as they are stable enough to be safely treated in community-based settings again. The average length of stay in psychiatric hospitals is now about 10 days” (Do Insane Asylums Still Exist? The Surprising Past and Present).
Considering the fact that in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum patients would stay their whole lives, it's a huge change to only now stay for 10 days average. Imagine being a child admitted too! If you were admitted to an institution at 13 years old in the 1920's, you would stay there about 70 years, but if you got admitted now you would only stay for about a week or two.
Mental hospitals nowadays focus on getting people the correct medication, discharging them relatively fast, and providing many things to do during the day. Hospitals are also no longer allowed to discriminate against the patients for any reason regarding physical or mental disabilities.