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Narrator
By the early 20th century, asylums overflowed with patients. Some Kirkbride facilities housed nearly 10 times more than originally planned, with only one doctor for hundreds of residents. (gentle music) And these doctors understood little about how to cure mental illness. We didn't know very much about the brain, how it worked and what happened to cause somebody to become mentally ill. I mean, we knew that the brain was an organ and we knew it resided inside the skull and we knew it was really an amalgam of many, many cells called neurons that were wired together, but we didn't know how they fit together, we didn't know what functions they served, and so we could do nothing to really treat people with severe mental illness. -
Narrator
To handle the ever-growing patient population, states expanded Kirkbride buildings and constructed new giant asylums, including the world's largest hospital of any kind, Pilgrim State in Long Island, which held more than 13,000 patients. Out of view from the public eye, desperate doctors experimented with new treatments. There are a lot of experimental therapies that now strike us as quite bizarre, even sadistic. It's important to understand that the people doing these things were very often true believers in what they were doing. They sincerely thought that their interventions were therapeutic and well-motivated The treatments that were attempted were based on speculations. And in most cases, they proved to be wrong. -
Narrator
In 1927, an Austrian doctor won a Nobel prize for his radical approach to treating patients with psychosis, so-called malaria therapy. He had observed that when patients in his asylum developed a fever, it often made them better. So he thought if I induce a fever, this will be therapeutic. So he would take the blood of malaria victims and inject it into mentally ill persons. He wasn't actually alleviating the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia. He was curing or improving people who had syphilis of the brain and the high fever was killing the microorganism. -
Narrator
While malaria therapy did help treat some psychoses caused by syphilis, the treatment didn't work for other ailments and could be deadly. When they had to explain away the fact that they'd originally promised they'd cure all these people they put into asylums and then they couldn't, they said, well, really that was because they were biologically defective, they weren't fully human, they were degenerates. The language became extremely, extremely harsh. It is for the best interest of the patients and of society that any inmate at the institution under his care should be sexually sterilized. Such superintendent is hereby authorized to perform the operation of sterilization on any such patient confined in the institution. In 1928, the Mississippi legislature passed a law allowing the sterilization of the mentally ill without consent. -
Narrator
Similar laws swept the nation, fueled by eugenics, a theory that categorized both the mentally ill and the mentally deficient as inferior. Eugenics is a kind of discipline that was founded by Francis Galton, who was related to Charles Darwin, where the idea was that the genetically feeble should in some way be winnowed out of the population. And that was an idea that was favorable to both conservatives, as well as progressives, who really looked forward to a bright future. -
Narrator
Over decades, tens of thousands of men and women in state-run institutions were sterilized against their will, often without their knowledge You go in for a different procedure, you come out and you're not able to reproduce. So this was happening in the context of eugenics being looked at as some legitimate science so that you could then justify not allowing people to reproduce. -
Man
(speaking German) This eugenics program in the United States kind of looped back to Nazi Germany, where the Nazis oversaw the murder of over 200,000 psychiatric patients in what was considered to be a prelude to the murder of then the disabled, and then, of course, the Jews.
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