“A position of great trust and responsibility”: a social history of the Grahamstown Asylum, 1875 – c. 1905

Van Zyl, Kylie

Title: “A position of great trust and responsibility”: a social history of the Grahamstown Asylum, 1875 – c. 1905
Creator: Van Zyl, Kylie
Subject: Mental health services -- South Africa -- Cape of Good Hope
Subject: Psychiatric hospitals -- South Africa -- History
Subject: South Africa -- Race relations -- Social aspects
Subject: Mentally ill -- Commitment and detention -- South Africa
Subject: Mentally ill -- Abuse of -- South Africa
Subject: Mental health policy -- South Africa
Subject: Asylums -- South Africa -- Grahamstown
Subject: Discrimination in mental health services -- South Africa
Subject: Health and race -- South Africa -- History
Date Issued: 2020
Date: 2020
Type: text
Type: Thesis
Type: Doctoral
Type: PhD
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/151031
Identifier: vital:39025
Description: Much has been written about the inequalities inherent in the psychiatric care provided to mentally ill individuals in the Cape Colony, but to date few works have been produced that describe in detail the processes and care regimes at particular institutions. This thesis examines the history of care and custody provided by the Grahamstown Asylum in the Cape between the years of 1875 and 1905. The intention is to determine the means and methods by which the Asylum’s authorities developed, almost unchallenged, a system of unequal treatment and favouritism within that facility, and what this meant for the men and women committed to the Asylum’s custody. To this end, contemporaneous official reports from Asylum staff and Colonial authorities were consulted, in conjunction with the Asylum’s internal records such as registers and individual patient files. This thesis concludes that the evolution of the Colony’s psychiatric community’s beliefs around mental illness, philosophies of protective custody and moral treatment within the psychiatric community at the time, the region’s laws governing psychiatric institutionalisation, and the larger context of the Cape’s socio-political environment at the time converged to create an institution that practiced discrimination on both a macro- and micro-level. This discriminatory framework affected who was admitted, the diagnosis that each person received, the asylum facilities to which they had access, and further, to the odds against their recovery. The implications of this study are relevant in the present day, as the modern South African system of psychiatric institutionalisation, though embedded within a socio-political context of equality and non-discrimination nevertheless appears to suffer from a similarly undemocratic framework of operation.
Format: 303 pages
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities, History
Language: English
Rights: Van Zyl, Kylie

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