Mental Health Timeline
Our timeline, from 1300 to 2015, provides context in terms of general mental health events, and mental health treatments for Bristol’s purpose built psychiatric hospital 1861-1994.
The infographic below highlights some key events and milestones, this is only a glimpse of the rich and complex story of mental health care and its evolution. To see the full timeline and learn more about the people and treatments involved, please visit us.
Treatment
Bristol Hospital
Mental Health
1247 - England's First Asylum
Known as Bethlehem and then Bethlem Hospital. A small establishment of 12 'cells' for paupers built on the site that is now covered by Liverpool Street station.
1407 -Divine or Demon?
Madness is open to religious interpretation.
1676 - Bethlem moves
The asylum moves to Moorfield. The régime was noted to be a mixture of punishment and religious devotion. It was then relocated a third time in 1815 to the present site of the Imperial War Museum and then finally to Beckenham, Kent in 1930.
1600s - Psychology & Melancholy
The term 'Psychology' is first used. 'Melancholy' or clinical depression is seen as fashionable for intellectuals.
1696 - Applied Psychology
The addition of infants, infirm and lunatics to the workhouse in Bristol.
1714 - Vagrancy Act
The first English act to make provisions for the detention of 'lunatics'.
1700 - Mad & Bad
Majority of people with mental health issues are locked up and ignored.
1784 - Occupational Therapy
William Tuke (a Quaker tea merchant) opens 'The Retreat' in York to provide positive treatments for the mentally ill. The development of occupational therapy can be attributed to his early work which places an emphasis on kindness.
1800 - Criminal Lunatics Act
This act aims to provide safe custody for criminal lunatics, in particular anyone who threatens the King.
1808 - County Asylums Act
All county corporations (councils) have a duty to look after pauper lunatics.
1845 - County Asylums act
Counties were slow to adopt the 1808 act so this act made them legally obliged to have asylums for paupers who were mentally ill. These new hospitals were progressive, restraint was removed and they were designed to provide holistic care.
1861 - Bristol Asylum Opens
Built for 300 patients. 164 patients move from St Peter's Hospital, the Workhouse in Bristol's city centre.
1863 - Serious Overcrowding
Beds in corridors and day rooms. Each year brings more patients.
1882 - First Neurology Clinic
Jean-Martin Charcot establishes the clinic in a French medical poor house, and is credited with proving that if the symptoms are not physical they maybe brain related.
1868 - Extension Approved
Year-by-year those patients thought to have recovered is less than half. The asylum expands in 1880s to over 1000 patients.
1884 - No Beer
Patients complain about beer being replaced with water.
1885 - Freud
Sigmund Freud, Austrian, father of psychoanalysis begins his work based not on medication or surgery but on listening and analysing what goes on in our unconscious mind through dreams.
1861 to 1900 - Half Recover
Over half the patients admitted since 1861 are discharged as recovered or relieved.
1890 - Lunacy Act
Provided additional safeguards against abuse of patients.
1907 - Analysing Dreams
Jung and Freud met and had a six-year friendship. Jung also believed in analysing dreams.
1913 - Behaviourism Forward
John Watson develops behaviourism in the USA. The emphasis is on external behaviour and people's reactions to given situations rather than their internal mental state.
1915 - Beaufort War Hospital
Asylum patients are moved to other asylums across the south west. The War Office takes over the Asylum.
1919 -War Hospital Closes
Over 29,000 wounded soldiers were treated, with just 164 deaths. Bristol Asylum patients return.
1934 - Convulsive Therapy
Convulsive Therapy is introduced by Hungarian neuropsychiatrist Ladislas Meduna who mistakenly believes that schizophrenia and epilepsy are antagonistic disorders.
1935 - Lobotomy
Lobotomies (the treatment of some mental illnesses by surgical operation on the brain) is introduced by Portuguese neurologist Dr Moniz.
1935 - Dancing
A part-time instructress of Morris dancing is employed.
1937 - ECT
Neuropsychiatrist Ugo Cerletti, uses electric shocks to produce seizures in animal experiments, and Lucio Bini develop the idea of using electricity as a substitute for metrazol and in 1938 experiment for the first time on a person.
1939 - Barrow Hospital
A new psychiatric hospital for Bristol to alleviate overcrowding at Bristol asylum, but as soon as 300 patients been transferred they were returned. Barrow is taken over as a naval war hospital and does not open for civilian patients until 1947.
1946 - ECT
A six channel Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) machine is purchased.
1942 to 1954 - Lobotomies
12,000 were performed in hospitals in England & Wales.
1949 - Lobotomy is lauded
Moniz receives the Nobel prize for medicine for the development of leucotomy for psychosis. In the wider world however, public opinion is starting to mount against the practice.
1948 - Bristol Mental Hospital
The Asylum is renamed when the NHS takes over the management from the local council. There are over 1,200 beds; although the cure rate has been good, the hospital is still overcrowded.
1948 - Birth of the NHS
The NHS takes control of over 100 mental asylums around the country with an average of 1,500 patients each.
1950s - Chemical Straitjacket
Anti-psychotic phenothiazines are used on patients. A chloropromazine called Largactil controls symptoms were patients lose contact with reality.
1951 - Improved Utilities
Refrigerators and heated trolleys introduced to ward kitchens. The large bare refectory tables are replaced with small tables for four. The milk, sugared tea from an urn is replaced by teapots with sugar bowls and milk jugs. Consistent water supply means cessation of communal bathing reducing skin infections.
1957 - Industrial Therapy Organisation (ITO)
Occupation is deleted by the new NHS from psychiatric hospitals. Dr Early, a consultant psychiatrist sees recovery rates fall, and enlists the help of local businessmen to find paid work for patients. By the end of 1958, one-third of the patients (380) are doing paid work as part of their therapy.
1959 - Mental Health Act
The Act abolishes the distinction between psychiatric and other hospitals and encourages the development of community care.
1960s - Jungian Analysis
Jung theories are popular. Concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes and the collective unconscious.
1960 - Name Change
Bristol Mental Hospital becomes Glenside Psychiatric Hospital. A survey of the 1,012 patients finds 37% no longer need hospital care but are so dependant that they cannot or do not actively seek to live outside the hospital.
1961 - Enoch Powell's Water Tower Speech
Health minister Enoch Powell proposes that mental hospital beds be reduced by 40% over the next 10 years. Health professionals agree large hospitals are not the best way to care for patients with mental illness but there is not enough support in the community.
1967 - Lobotomy Unpopular
Walter Freeman, one of the biggest practitioners of lobotomy in America, is banned from performing the procedure after one of his patients dies.
1988 - Prozac
New generation anti-depressants introduced.
1990 - Shrinking
Just 294 patients left at Glenside Psychiatric Hospital.
1993 - Atypical Anti-Psychotics
Risperidone launched. These have less debilitating side effects.
1994 - Glenside Hospital Closes
Still on site to this day however are Fromeside Secure Mental Health Unit, for patients with a criminal history or risks and behaviours deemed unmanageable in mainstream care.
1999 to present -AWP an NHS Trust is formed
Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) provides healthcare for people with serious mental illness, learning disabilities and autism in inpatient and community-based settings.
2012 - Closures
Laundry and sewing room close, having cleaned and made items for local hospitals for over 100 years.
2013 - Discrimination Act
The Mental Health Discrimination Act supports ways of ending discrimination and stigma, e.g. people with mental health problems can sit on juries, cannot be removed as a director of a company and cannot lose their seat if they are an MP.
2024 - Training
The Glenside building continues to deliver training to nurses as the University of West of England 's Health and Social Care Campus.
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