num_pages: 220
description: Between the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 and the Great Depression in 1929 the San Francisco Superior Court committed more than 12000 city residents to the insane asylums of California. Who were these people? What brought them to the attention of the court and what behavior did the medical examiner cite as evidence of insanity? What do these commitment reveal about the social and cultural meanings of insanity and other forms of deviant behavior in industrial California - and by extension in the rest of urban America in the early twentieth century? This book - the first historical study to analyze thousands of court commitment records - provides an original look at the social institutional and professional web in which deviant individual were officially judged so far disordered in mind that they were dangerous to be at large. a full two-thirds of all those committed were to judge by the court records odd peculiar or simply immoral individuals who displayed no symptoms indicating severe disability or violent or destructive tendencies. However surprising this fact may seem it is not at all unexpected in view of the expressed function of insane asylums in the late nineteenth century. The rise of new institutions(clinics and wards) and new professions ( psychiatry and psychiatric social work) in cities like San Francisco by the 1920s marked a decisive turning point. California has led the nation in the effort to shut down hospitals and replace them with community health centers. This study makes a start at examining the early transitional years.
language: English
title: So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870-1930
publisher: Univ of California Pr