Snake pit therapy?

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The term "snake pit" is commonly associated with earlier versions of mental institutions but did it come from a form of therapy actually used to treat depression or is this idea an urban legend?

-- Chuck Archer (archer@zanesville.k12.oh.us), June 11, 2004

Answers

According to the OED, the reference to mental hospitals as "Snakepits" derives from a 1947 novel:

3. spec. A mental hospital (after the title of the novel by M. J. Ward: see quot. 1947). 1947 M. J. WARD (title) The snake pit. 1960 Sunday Express 15 May 17/4 The snake-pit women's ward. 1968 A. LASKI Keeper ii. 22 They had visited him in the snake~pit. 1976 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 30 Apr. 5/1 It's like going back to the days when psychiatric hospitals everywhere were called snakepits.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), June 11, 2004.


I have found a relevant website sponsored by the "Citizens Commission on Human Rights" (which seems to be, at least in part, an anti-psychiatry or "psychiatric survivors" group -- see http://www.cchr.org/doctors/eng/page07.htm). The site seem to be an electronic book entitled "Harming in the Name of Healthcare." Paragraph 6 of chapter 2, referring to the hospitaux generaux of 17th-century France, reads as follows:

"From asylums grew the expertise of the institutional custodian, the direct predecessor to the institutional psychiatrist. The phrase snake pit -- slang for "mental hospital" -- stems from these early custodial days, when the insane were thrown into a serpent-filled hole to shock them back to their senses."

No reference is given, so it is impossible to tell whether the is good evidence for this claim or not. Nearby references include:

Thomas Szasz, M.D., The Manufacture of Madness, (Harper & Row, New York, 1970), p. 299.

Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylums to the Age of Prozac, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1997), p. 17.

so it is possible that the claims comes from one of these two works. Perhaps you can backtrack from there. Szasz, of course, is widely known for his belief that "mental illness" is a "myth" -- that the folks we call "insane" have just "problems of living." Shorter's book is well-known, but is condiered by many historians to be a "whiggish" self-justificatory for modern psychiatry. I have personally heard him speak where he has purveyed such common falsehoods as that the mad were widely regarded as being possessed in the middle ages. The accusation of possession was actually quite rare (though spectacular and memorable). Madness was more commonly thought to be a problem with the brain (or the fluids withing the brain) in the middle ages.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), June 11, 2004.


Actually, be VERY WARY of the source in the immediately preceeding message. The CCHR is actually a branch of the "Church of Scientology."

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), June 11, 2004.

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