On Private Asylums for the Insane

1863 ◽  
Vol 9 (47) ◽  
pp. 319-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Eastwood

These establishments have scarcely received their due share of attention and discussion in the pages of the ‘Journal of Mental Science.’ To account for this, the principal reason is, no doubt, that medical practitioners feel themselves less at liberty to write about private houses and private cases than about those large public institutions which have become necessary in almost every county. This is not to be wondered at, for charitable and pauper institutions, where the poor themselves pay nothing except through the regular assessments, have always been considered peculiarly the places where more extended observations could be made than amongst private patients. However, as there is much that is different in the management, and in the social, though not in the moral and medical treatment of the two classes of patients, the observations which I shall make will probably not be considered out of place.

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-180
Author(s):  
George K. Silver

To go back to a period more than five decades ago to talk about the health left is to enter not just another time, but another world. Between the Great Depression and the postwar period, challenging and contradictory social, political, and professional developments were brought to the surface in U.S. life. The health left shared in the opportunities and confusion, enriching the American spirit and participating in both the pleasures and the pain. The 1930s saw economic depression, wars, the birth of fascism, and fears of social collapse. In medicine, despite sporadic scientific advances, the social response was remote and narrow. But social activism motivated medical students and medical practitioners. The 1940s marked a change in both attitudes and values. The left was divided, and bitter factionalism stymied cooperative action. Participation in the war against fascism promoted solidarity, despite the sadness of the evidence of brutality and lack of humanity. The 1950s are sometimes considered regressive, but seeds germinated as the complexity of medical life engendered new approaches to meeting sociomedical needs. As we entered the 1960s a different and more hopeful story unfolded as the rebellions of the poor, blacks, and women brought about a new era of social action.


1971 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-357
Author(s):  
Russell L. Curtis, Jr. ◽  
Louis A. Zurcher, Jr.

1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-382
Author(s):  
M. Javed Akbar Zaki

To many social theoreticians, the population explosion, particularly in the developing nations presents a crippling threat to their developmental pro¬cesses. Their argument's validity rests mainly on the assumption that expected economic progress is swallowed up by unbalanced rise of numbers in the population. The book being reviewed deals mainly with this subject matter and is divided into two parts, each containing three articles contributed by various researchers. Part one, 'The Social context of Fertility Decision' is focused on analyzing the role of factors affecting fertility at the micro-level decision making process. The first article 'Fertility decision in rural India' by Vinod Jainath, examines the applicability to rural India of various models of the process of fertility decision making and finds most of these wanting with respect to the Indian social situation. While analyzing the fertility patterns of Rural India, he points out the positive need for larger families among the poor small farmers mainly due to labour supply considerations. The author argues that unemployment and under¬employment actually motivate the poor to have more children as it better ensures their economic security in their old age. As the chances of gaining employ¬ment for their offspring diminish, they are induced to increase the total number of children in order that atleast one will be able to support them. Thus a vicious circle of poverty arises in large families because of each of the parents wanting to increase their children's chances of employment by ultimately reducing the overall employment opportunities even further and exacerbating their poverty.


Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.


Author(s):  
Claire Taylor

This chapter lays out the theoretical approach for the book and discusses the methodological problems of writing about poverty and the poor in the ancient world. Whilst studying the lives of the poor in the ancient world is to some extent elusive, it argues that historians can do more than simply imagine this group of people back into the gaps left by other evidence. As well as reviewing previous scholarship on poverty in the ancient world, it suggests a way forward which is more in line with contemporary poverty research within the social sciences.


Author(s):  
Brittany Pearl Battle

This chapter examines the sociocognitive dimensions of cultural categorizations of deservingness. The social issue of poverty has been a persistent source of debate in the American system of policy development, influenced by conceptual distinctions between the “haves” and “have-nots,” “working moms” and “unemployed dads,” and the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” Although there is a wealth of literature discussing the ideological underpinnings of stratification systems, these discussions often focus on categorical distinctions between the poor and the nonpoor, with much less discussion of distinctions made among the poor. Moreover, while scholars of culture and policy have long referenced the importance of cultural categories of worthiness in policy development, the theoretical significance of these distinctions has been largely understudied. I expand the discourse on the relationship between cultural representations of worth and social welfare policy by exploring how these categories are conceptualized. Drawing on analytical tools from a sociology of perception framework, I create a model that examines deservingness along continuums of morality and eligibility to highlight the taken-for-granted cultural subtleties that shape perceptions of the poor. I focus on social filters created by norms of poverty, welfare, and the family to explore how the deserving are differentiated from the undeserving.


Author(s):  
Alfred F. S. Owusu ◽  
Alhassan Abdullah ◽  
Godfred H. Pinto ◽  
Hajara Bentum ◽  
Janet Tein Ni Moo ◽  
...  

In this study, we attempted to move beyond the skewed discussions on stigma to unravel other social consequences that are experienced by persons who have recovered from COVID-19. We conducted a documentary review of published news reports from 14 highly ranked news portals in Ghana and Malaysia (published between 1st January 2020 and 30th August 2020) that contained personal accounts from the recovered patients about their lived experiences with the virus and social consequences encountered after recovery. Narratives from the recovered patients were extracted and analyzed following the narrative thematic analysis procedure. Common themes identified from the narratives included: 1) Stigma impacting mental health, 2) Assault and abuse 3) Experiences of treatment. The findings show the need for interprofessional collaboration between social and health care professionals such as social workers, community health workers, medical practitioners and psychologists to prevent and address issues of abuse and other social consequences experienced by COVID-19 survivors.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092110257
Author(s):  
Qiong Li ◽  
Chen Deng ◽  
Bin Zuo ◽  
Xiaobin Zhang

This study explored whether vertical position affects social categorization of the rich and the poor. Experiment 1 used high- and low-income occupations as stimuli, and found participants categorized high-income occupations faster when they were presented in the top vertical position compared to the bottom vertical position. In Experiment 2, participants responded using either the “up” or “down” key to categorize high- and low-income occupations, and responded faster to high-income occupations with the “up” key and low-income occupations with the “down” key. In Experiment 3, names identified as belonging to either rich or poor individuals were presented at the top or bottom of a screen, and the results were the same as in Experiments 1 and 2. These findings suggest that social categorization based on wealth involved perceptual simulations of vertical position, and that vertical position affects the social categorization of the rich and the poor.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujayita Bhattacharjee ◽  
Sanjukta Sattar

PurposeThe lives of the poor in the urban spaces of India are filled with hardships. They live amidst poverty and struggle to survive within other problems such as insecure jobs, lack of proper housing, unsanitary conditions and low levels of health immunity. This vulnerable section of the population has been rendered furthermore vulnerable by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that were never imagined before. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this article is to examine the vulnerability of the poor in the urban settings of India with special reference to Mumbai in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology adopted in the study is based on the analysis of secondary data and content analysis of the existing literature. In addition to this, the study also makes use of certain narratives of the urban poor in Mumbai that have been captured by various articles, reports and blogs.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal how the urban poor of India, with special reference to Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has emerged as the worst sufferers of the socioeconomic crisis caused by the social distancing and lockdown measures imposed for combating the pandemic.Originality/valueThe study tries to explore the reality of the urban poor's right to the city in the wake of the pandemic.


Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer

In the past decade, significant social movements emerged in South Africa, in response to specific urban challenges of injustice or exclusion. This article will interrogate the meaning of such urban social movements for theological education and the church. Departing from a firm conviction that such movements are irruptions of the poor, in the way described by Gustavo Gutierrez and others, and that movements of liberation residing with, or in a commitment to, the poor, should be the locus of our theological reflection, this article suggests that there is much to be gained from the praxis of urban social movements, in disrupting, informing and shaping the praxis of both theological education and the church. I will give special consideration to Ndifuna Ukwazi and the Reclaim the City campaign in Cape Town, the Social Justice Coalition in Cape Town, and Abahlali baseMjondolo based in Durban, considering these as some of the most important and exciting examples of liberatory praxes in South Africa today. I argue that theological education and educators, and a church committed to the Jesus who came ‘to liberate the oppressed’, ignore these irruptions of the Spirit at our own peril.


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