The Asylum Movement

In the 1700s and 1800s, it became much more common to institutionalize the mentally ill, and this unhappy development also affected many OCD sufferers.

In the mid-1700s, Susannah Wesley was aghast that a man possibly suffering only from scrupulosity was involuntarily committed to a "madhouse."¹

J.E.D. Esquirol (1782-1840)

The French physician J.E.D. Esquirol, who in the 1830s described a patient's compulsive checking symptom, wrote that the patient's malady "ought to be studied with the more care, since those suffering from it know how to deceive the most skillful physicians; because they dissemble their condition, in presence of those who notice them, and have authority to decide on the question of their isolation; [and] because they impose upon judicial magistrates in their legal capacity, when about to administer upon their persons or fortune[.]"²

Woman with scrupulosity at asylum, c.1858

The image at left shows a woman suffering from "religious melancholy" (another term for scrupulosity) who was institutionalized at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s.³

By the late 19th century, physicians reached a consensus that OCD was not a form of insanity. It became more unusual to put OCD sufferers in asylums. This advance came about largely as a result of the effort to classify and categorize OCD and other mental illnesses.

¹Susannah Wesley's letter to her son John (1746).

²J.E.D. Esquirol (1838), p. 351.

³This image is based on a photograph taken by Hugh W. Diamond. Using an early camera, Diamond took photographs of some of the patients at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s. He labeled this image "religious melancholy," which was a common term for scrupulosity. The image (a print made from the photograph) is available from the Wellcome Library. See also Numbers, 1986, p. 56.