Madness and Marriage

Mrs. E. P. W. Packard was incarcerated at the State Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois from 1860 till 1863. Her case was the first, and is probably still the most famous, exposé of what has since become known as “false commitment” to a mental hospital. Although her story is mentioned in most texts on the history of psychiatry, it seems safe to assume that few psychiatrists and even fewer nonpsychiatrists have read Mrs. Packard’s intensely interesting and well-documented book on her ordeal and on the legal, religious, and social circumstances that made it possible. Moreover, despite all the evidence regarding the reasons for Mrs. Packard’s commitment, many psychiatric historians continue to treat her shabbily. Thus, Albert Deutsch casts doubt on her “sanity” and dismisses her efforts at reform as counterproductive. “Whether Mrs. Packard was mentally sound or not at the time of her commitments or confinement is a moot question,” he writes. “It appears to be established that she suffered from certain delusions and had been a patient at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for a brief period when a girl.” * And in the style of the true psychiatric believer that he was, Deutsch offers this comment about the results of Mrs. Packard’s labors: “… she succeeded in getting the Illinois legislature to enact, in 1867, a law ‘for the protection of personal liberty,’ which prohibited the commitment of any person to an institution for the insane without trial by jury. In this case, the remedy proved worse than the condition it was supposed to cure. The requirement of a jury trial did not protect the insane at all, nor the sane for that matter, since it left the decision as to insanity in the hands of a lay jury ignorant of the medical aspects of mental disease. … Needless to say, the Illinois law met with unanimous opposition of the psychiatric and allied professions.” †