The Colonial Asylum Regime

Abstract

The main ostensible purposes of colonial lunatic asylums were to provide effective curative treatment for mentally disordered people and to ensure the safety and security of the public at large. In some cases patients achieved recovery, followed by a resumption of social and economic roles in family and community. In other less promising instances the goals were more modest, comprising behavioural improvement, risk reduction, and a reasonably comfortable existence in controlled surroundings. In effect the asylum regime aimed to change the agitated, distressed, or threatening person into a settled and calm, even almost rational member of the patient community. The primary means employed were the techniques associated with moral management, which were known about but hardly implemented before British doctors brought them out to the West Indies. These were augmented, to some extent, by medically based remedies that involved medicines or physical interventions. Key to the whole enterprise were the asylum attendants, expected to provide the direct care and management of the patients.

The order and quiet of the Asylum, and the absence of all irritating causes, oftentimes seem to transform him who was violent and dangerous outside its walls into a very harmless and tractable patient.¹