General Hospital Psychiatry and Mental Health Legislation

Although treatment of the mentally ill has had a long past institutionalisation as a method of handling the mentally ill has a relatively brief history. Deutsch (1949) has brilliantly documented the course of development of the asylum in the USA. The asylum concept developed primarily so as to provide a milieu for a more humane custodial care of the mentally ill as compared to their own homes where they were often maltreated. Often the mentally ill were put under restraint or solitary confinement and subjected to other humiliations ana deprivations, partly, no doubt, as the families did not know how else to handle them. The primary objective thus was not of incarceration or to spare the society of their aggression,