Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Dix

Introduction

The study relates to Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), who was a teacher from Massachusetts. She shocked the U.S. Congress with reports of brutal treatment of inmates of a madhouse. Due to his efforts, many state mental hospitals were built throughout the United States, often in rural settings, which provided good food, social activities, and work on farms. Dorothea Dix also influenced Canadian reforms, including the establishment of the first mental hospital in Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, over time, many of these mental hospitals became human warehouses, providing custodial care and little else; contradicting human treatment planned by Dix.

Discussion

During the Civil War, Dorothea Dix served as superintendent of nurses and also a reformer for better treatment of the mentally ill people. Dix's father profited from occupant cultivating, lecturing, and offering his printed sermons. Dix's larger family had a larger number of prosperous foundations than her nuclear family; the grandfather of Dix was a rich physician, synthetic maker, and land designer in Boston. At this point, she likewise met Anne Heath, a lady from a rich family who might turn into her long lasting companion (Brown, 1998).

In 1836, Dix left teaching as she was facing health problems relating to lung issues and melancholy in the wake of being removed from her family house emulating her grandma's passing. She was frightened by the conditions she discovered there. Mentally ill women were existing in the correctional facility, exposed, foul, and affixed. There was no high temperature, since authorities contended that “insane people” couldn't feel the icy and might blaze themselves and the building provided that they were given any wellspring of high temperature. Dix used a year touring each prison in Massachusetts. She discovered that the mentally ill were routinely secured away imprisons or in their families' lofts. She composed letters of challenge and shock to neighborhood powers that were distributed in nearby daily papers (Gollaher, 1995).

In the composed report that went hand in hand with her confirmation, she archived the states of about 1,000 crazy prisoners. She said, “I move ahead Gentlemen, quickly to point out the current situation with Insane Persons bound to the Commonwealth, in pens, wardrobes, stalls, pens! Tied, stripped, whipped with bars, and lashed into acquiescence!” Her confession brought about the redesign of a refuge in Worcester. She put the discoveries of her overview in an appeal to the general court also. The state assembly voted to republish her request of as an administration distribution and conveyed 5,000 duplicates all around the state. A couple of months after her 41st special day, Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature was distributed. She served as scientist, news person, creator of revisions, and engineer of the refuge itself (Tiffany, 1993).

She used the following 40 years of her existence reporting ill-use of mental patients all around the United States. She effectively prodded authoritative changes in 15 states and directly managed the stronghold of 32 mental hospitals. During a period when the national government was giving millions of sections of land of area ...