Institutional Care of the Mentally Disordered in Canada — a 17th Century Record

1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 274-278
Author(s):  
John D. Griffin ◽  
Cyril Greenland
Keyword(s):  
Length Of Stay ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Institutional Care ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
New France ◽  
General Hospitals ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Mentally Disordered

“General hospitals” for the care of the helpless poor, the aged and infirm, lunatics and idiots, which were developed in the mid-17th century by Louis XIV of France, soon spread to the colony in New France. Francois Charon, a wealthy businessman, built the Hôpital Général de Ville Marie, Montreal, which was opened in 1694 to care for impoverished and helpless men. The Hospital Register, discovered in the Archives of the Soeurs Grises, Montreal, provides details of the patients’ names, dates of and reasons for admission and the dates of discharge or death. An analysis of the Register, covering the 45 years of the Charon period, reveals that among the 66 boys and men admitted, from 1694 to 1738, at least seven inmates suffered from some form of mental disorder or retardation. This suggests that the Hôpital Général de Ville Marie, together with the Hôpital Général de Québec, were the first Canadian institutions to provide care for the mentally disordered. Pierre Chevallier, who was retarded, lived in the hospital for 44 years until his death at the age of 85. The length of stay in the hospital indicates that the early settlers of New France were men of robust constitution and that the regime provided by the Frères Charon was physically as well as spiritually sustaining.

Mental disorder and homicide: a review of epidemiological research

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Woodward ◽  
Jean Nursten ◽  
Paul Williams ◽  
Doug Badger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Epidemiological Research ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Comprehensive Search ◽  
General Populations ◽  
Key Questions

SummaryObjective – This paper reviews 28 studies on the epidemiology of homicide committed by mentally disordered people, taken from recent international academic literature. Methods – The studies included were identified as part of a wider systematic review of the epidemiology of offending combined with mental disorder. The main databases searched were Embase, Medline, HealthStar, Psyclit, Mental Health Abstracts, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, and Criminology Penology and Police Science Abstracts. A comprehensive search was made for studies published since 1990, supplemented with key studies from the 1980s identified through citation tracing and personal contacts. Results – A summary is given in tabular form of the content and quality of each study. There is then discussion of the studies in eight categories: descriptive studies, studies of trends, comparative studies amongst homicide offenders, amongst prisoners and including general populations, studies of homicide of relatives, follow-up studies, and studies of recidivism. Conclusions – There is an association of homicide with mental disorder, most particularly with certain manifestations of schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder and drug or alcohol abuse. However, the quality of epidemiological research in this area is not adequate to answer key questions, and prediction of potential for homicide remains elusive. Further research is needed.

The Album De Colbert: The Image of Shipbuilding

2021 ◽  
Vol 163 (A3) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Corradi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Shipbuilding Industry ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The Album de Colbert compiled by an anonymous author in the second half of the seventeenth century is among the most important illustrated testimonies of the art of shipbuilding. Probably commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Minister of Finance and Minister of the Navy of the kingdom of France, the Album was composed to make Louis XIV understand the complexity of shipbuilding. It was also made to support the creation of a navy with the ambition of being competitive with the Royal Navy and with the intent of modernising and expanding the French shipbuilding industry. The fifty plates that make up this illustrated treatise unravel the story of the construction of a first-rank 80-gun line vessel, from the laying of the keel to the launch. It is a unique document that has no contemporaries or precursors because it is not a didactic collection of boats, like the previous treaties that had a completely different methodological approach, more technical-descriptive than illustrative, but it wants to go beyond the scientific treatise. Its purpose was instead to measure itself with representation, showing through the strength of drawing and images the peculiar aspects of the reality of shipbuilding, using iconography as a means of transmitting knowledge related to the world of shipyards and shipbuilding in the 17th century.

scholarly journals Psychiatry in Sri Lanka

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 686-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. L. A. Kuruppuarachchi ◽  
R. R. Rajakaruna
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Community Care ◽  
Institutional Care ◽  
General Hospitals ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Education And Health ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Moment

Sri Lanka is a developing country situated in the Indian ocean with a population of about 18.5 million. Its education and health care services are free in the state sector. Psychiatric services are mainly confined to the units in the general hospitals and two large mental hospitals situated in Angoda and Mulleriyawa (suburbs of Colombo) at the moment. However the institutional care is gradually changing and many professionals are aware of the importance of community care. There are a few reasonably organised community centres available at present.

The Wilds, Untamed, and Spontaneity

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-196
Author(s):  
Alexus McLeod
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
Positive Account ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 discusses a “positive” account of madness. The Zhuangist, among others, focuses on the way we can understand an inherent value in madness depending on how we conceive of situations in given perspectives, and that we have reason to resist understanding particular people as mad or disordered objectively. The idea here is to include any mental state that is regularly seen as problematic or getting in the way of efficient or proper human functioning. This chapter also discusses a host of mad or mentally disordered individuals found in early Chinese texts, with the aim of understanding how they fit into the structure built thus far, and how various appearances of these characters (such as the “Madman of Chu”) in different texts will often serve to illustrate the divergent messages about mental disorder we find in these texts.

The Imprisonment of Mentally Disordered Offenders

1978 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 194-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Health Service ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Care Management ◽  
Medical Officer ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Criminal Offence ◽  
Mentally Disordered Offenders ◽  
Mentally Disordered

I am glad to have this opportunity to talk about an unfortunate consequence of developments in the Health Service over recent years. My theme will be what is now happening to mentally disordered people who have committed criminal offences. At present, many of them are going to prison. The prison system—already severely overcrowded—contains some hundreds of mentally disordered offenders who in the opinion of prison medical officers need and are capable of gaining benefit from care, management and treatment in psychiatric hospitals. When using the term ‘mental disorder’ I shall, of course, be referring to those states of mind which have been classified and defined in Section 4 of the Mental Health Act 1959: members of the College who work in the National Health Service will be relieved to know that I do not share the view of the citizens of Samuel Butler's Erewhon that crime itself is an illness, whose sufferers should all be placed in the hands of the omniscient psychopathologists. Indeed, when one has the practical responsibility for the provision of health care for prisoners, it is quite irrelevant whether or not they committed their offences as a result of a mental disorder or whether their mental disorder developed before or after the offence or trial. The only thing that matters is their present condition. If a prisoner is suffering from mental disorder of a nature or degree that warrants his detention in hospital for treatment, then the prison medical officer will want to bring about his admission to hospital under the appropriate section of the 1959 Act. This is wholly in accordance with the philosophy of the Act, which does not limit hospital admission to cases in which the criminal offence was causally related to a mental disorder. In this talk I shall want to consider why in so many cases hospital places cannot be found.

The Treatment of Cases of Mental Disorder in General Hospitals (Reprinted from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. clxx, No. 17, pp. 637–642, April 23rd, 1914.) Philip Coombs Knapp, A.M., M.D.

1916 ◽  
Vol 62 (258) ◽  
pp. 624-626
Author(s):  
Philip Coombs Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Nursing Staff ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Hospitals ◽  
Mental Patients ◽  
Acute Infections ◽  
Boston Medical ◽  
Surgical Journal ◽  
Almost All

The author maintains the thesis that acute and borderland cases of mental disease can be received and temporarily cared for in general hospitals. He admits that mental patients are not looked upon with favour by the nursing staff or by the other patients, on account of—in many cases—their restless, noisy conduct. Yet almost all general hospitals must include at times among their inmates some patients who, in the course of treatment for such conditions as acute infections, accidents, etc., become turbulent and violent.

International perspectives and practice differences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay D. G. Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mentally Disordered Offenders ◽  
Mentally Disordered ◽  
The World ◽  
Ethical Stance ◽  
The Right

Across the developed world, services for those with mental disorder in prison have been established but are seldom equivalent to those found in the community. Prisoners are largely the socio-economically deprived with high rates of mental disorder. They have often been victimized. Prisons are our new asylums. In the United States three times as many mentally ill people are in prison than in psychiatric hospital. It is essential that whatever our geographical location, we learn from other jurisdictions and other systems. Rates of imprisonment, organization of psychiatric services, and location of treatment of mentally disordered offenders all vary; and it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the system with which you are familiar is the right one. There are major differences across the world in terms of rates of imprisonment, place of treatment of acutely ill prisoners, and the structure of our mental health services in prisons. Those requiring hospital care should be transferred out of prison for this. Independence of health services from correctional services would promote the development of the former. One challenging issue for correctional psychiatry in some jurisdictions is capital punishment and psychiatrists ethically should have no role in executions and be aware of the ethical stance of the World Psychiatric Association. This chapter examines correctional psychiatry in an international context and explores similarities and differences in our practices, and the cultural, political, and economic background to these.

Popular Song in the Age of Louis XIV

Music ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Romey
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Popular Songs

Across early modern Europe popular tunes functioned as canvases for new texts and they served thereby as a tool for oral and written communication. Song enabled literate, semiliterate, and illiterate members of the population to participate in the circulation of news, gossip, and rumors and to mock both current events and individuals through satire. When performed, songs also encouraged audience participation when a tune had a refrain. In France in the 17th and 18th centuries, popular songs, often referred to as vaudevilles or pont-neufs, permeated urban and rural soundscapes. Popular tunes played an important social role in the lives of individuals from all social spheres, from singers begging for donations in the streets to members of fashionable Parisian society who gathered at salons and at the court. Mondains, members of fashionable society who frequently had literary pretensions, composed and preserved (in manuscripts, known today as chansonniers, as well as in printed publications) song texts that circulated between friends, acquaintances, and in the streets. Vaudevilles became associated with the Pont-Neuf, a spacious “new” bridge that functioned as a central thoroughfare but also a public space in which Parisians came to shop, hear the latest gossip, and be entertained by charlatans, street singers, and itinerant actors. Popular song also flourished in close connection to theater, and in the late 17th century popular songs began to play an increasingly prominent role in the Parisian theaters, namely the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française. By the early 18th century, comic opera (opéra-comique) emerged as a flexible satirical genre of popular theater. In this genre, which at first intermingled sung tunes with spoken prose, vaudevilles served as musical and structural building blocks and enabled audience participation in a manner similar to street performances. Besides the use of vaudevilles, early French comic operas continued the tradition developed in street song and in the late-17th-century theaters of parodying operas and opera airs. Some airs from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s ballets and operas, for example, became vaudevilles and survive with many new texts intended to be sung to simplified versions of his melodies. People from all social ranks, including street performers, servants, salonnières, courtiers, playwrights, and actors created and performed these parodic songs. When we discuss a body of popular songs during the reign of Louis XIV, then, we must imagine a constantly changing repertory that absorbed any tune that was, in contemporary parlance, “in the mouths” of the population. The study of French popular song, therefore, requires a broad interdisciplinary approach.

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