I guess I never thought about it before now. Not really.
But once upon a time, in our world, in our country, the mentally ill were tortured. Punished. There are so many terrifying mental health remedies that can be traced back to prehistoric times.
But the asylums of the world that came about during the mid-1700s marked a period of some of the most inhumane mental health treatments. I shouldn’t even call them treatments. This is when asylums themselves became “notorious warehouses” for the mentally ill.
The earliest mental institutions only had one purpose. They never intended to help the patients or to “cure” them. Rather, it was just a way of keeping them segregated from society.
Until Dorothea Lynde Dix came along. She was a nurse and a social activist. But first things first. She was born, on this day, April 4, in 1802. In Hampden, Maine. Our nation was just “rolling out” at that time, if you think about it. She was the oldest of three children in her family, and her father was quite a religious fanatic. He was strict, harsh. And Dorothea didn’t care for much of it. So when she was 12, it was somehow arranged that she leave home with an Aunt and Grandmother, and head for Boston.
She must have been smart as a whip. By age 14 she was teaching. By the time she was 17, she had started a home for girls, she wrote textbooks and ran a charity for poor girls, so they could attend school.
Then, in 1841, her life changed. She started teaching Sunday School at a women’s prison in Maine. She found some pretty bad conditions there, but even more so for the prisoners with mental illnesses. They had no heat in their living quarters, in those cells, in cold Maine. So she went to court and secured an order for better living conditions, which included heat.
She didn’t stop with that particular prison. She went around, from place to place, doing much of the same. Dix worked with the mentally ill, specifically the poor mentally ill. She led an ongoing campaign with the US Congress and local legislatures. She was relentless. But her determination paid off and her campaign ended in the development of the first mental asylums.
At the beginning of things, she appeared before the state legislature and delivered a report, in which she said: “I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.”
Dix spent years and years of campaigning for their rights. Her Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane? Well, she saw it through, and it passed both houses of Congress. Then the door slammed shut. It was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. It would have set aside 12.2 million acres of federal land for the benefit of mentally ill patients. One veto, by Pierce.
She was a woman of virtue. During the American Civil War, she was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses by the Union Army. She continued working for people’s rights. She tried to change systems. This brought about many conflicts with her superiors during the war. She resigned in 1865. However, Dix remained a popular figure in the South for her even treatment of both sides during the war.
After the war, she briefly returned to her work on behalf of the mentally ill. She contracted malaria in 1870. Because of her illness, she was forced to abandon aggressive traveling. However, she continued to write, lobbying for her causes. She took up residence at the hospital she had founded 40 years earlier in Trenton, New Jersey, and died there on July 17, 1887.
She worked her entire life, relentlessly, for the mentally ill.
And that was Dorothea Dix.
Our treatment of mental illness still has a LONG way to go. But thankfully, because of Dix, we are many steps away from those dark, dark ages.
Where there is light, there can be no darkness.
Dorothea Dix was a light in this world.
We can all be a light in this world. Whether we are making toast, or championing the rights of others, we can do it with light.
In our own little ways, we can be the light.
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“There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
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“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
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“Are not rays of light very small bodies emitted from shining substances?”
— Isaac Newton
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