MODULE 03 // INSTITUTIONS

The Asylum Age

The history of psychiatry is often told as a story of progress: from chains to pills. But the reality is a story of classification and containment. As Foucault observed in Madness and Civilization, the "madman" was not a medical patient until the Enlightenment needed a place to put him.

Bedlam and Containment

The early institutions, like Bethlem Royal Hospital ("Bedlam") in London, were not hospitals in the modern sense. They were human zoos. The goal was not cure, but segregation. If the mind was a "ghost" (per Descartes), then a broken mind was a haunting, something to be locked away.

The Medicalization of Misery

By the 19th and 20th centuries, the asylum became the clinic. We traded chains for lobotomies, and later for Thorazine. This was the era of "Biological Psychiatry"—the belief that if we could just find the broken wire, we could fix the machine.

The Classification Error: The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) categorized symptoms, not causes. We labeled "sadness" as Major Depressive Disorder and "fear" as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. This is equivalent to classifying a fever as "Hot Forehead Syndrome" without looking for the infection.

We built massive institutions and pharmaceutical empires on these labels. But we failed to solve the underlying problem: the rigidity of the neural network itself.

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