So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870-1930

by Richard Wightman Fox

Between the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 and the Great Depression in 1929 the San Francisco Superior Court committed more than 12,000 city residents to the insane asylums of California. Who were these people? What brought them to the attention of the court, and what behavior did the medical examiner cite as evidence of insanity? What do these commitment reveal about the social and cultural meanings of insanity and other forms of deviant behavior in industrial California - and by extension in the rest of urban America in the early twentieth century? This book - the first historical study to analyze thousands of court commitment records - provides an original look at the social, institutional, and professional web in which deviant individual were officially judged "so far disordered in mind" that they were "dangerous to be at large." a full two-thirds of all those committed were to judge by the court records, odd, peculiar, or simply immoral individuals who displayed no symptoms indicating severe disability, or violent or destructive tendencies. However surprising this fact may seem, it is not at all unexpected in view of the expressed function of insane asylums in the late nineteenth century. The rise of new institutions(clinics and wards) and new professions ( psychiatry and psychiatric social work) in cities like San Francisco by the 1920s marked a decisive turning point. California has led the nation in the effort to shut down hospitals and replace them with community health centers. This study makes a start at examining the early, transitional years.

Genres: Psychiatry

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Richard Wightman Fox is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the author of Jesus in America and Trials of Intimacy, among other books. He lives in Venice, California.

Reviews

[Annie Cheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough background read; precise and careful to avoid the simplistic urge to conceptualize insanity commitments as a straightforward moral tug of war between elite reformers/enforcers and marginalized deviants. I have a lot of questions now, especially about the role of family and kin groups in shaping a lot of these trends

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an expansion of a doctoral thesis regarding the criteria used to commit the insane to insane asylums in California at the turn of the 19th to 20th century.

Bottom line: it looks like people were committed mostly because they didn't fit in with society. There were some insane people committed, but they were a minority. The majority really should have been committed to old folks homes (almshouses) or rehab facilities (hospitals for alcoholics and drug addicts), or a religious institution for moral instruction. (I am not equating these three things, but the asylum inmates were quite heterogeneous, with each requiring something different from actual mental health services.

Asylums were dumping grounds for the indigent, and others that made people uncomfortable.

It was all a prelude to the eugenics forced sterilization of thousands of people who came under the power of the State of California. The book discusses this as well.

There are a lot of statistics, tables and discussions on how the data is folded, spindled and mutilated. The book is important as a reference, but it gets tedious as an actually read.

I suggest reading, "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck" by Adam Cohen.

[Kelli Thalman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped me understand a little better how we've arrived at this point in the treatment of mental health based on where we've been. Very interesting and informative.