Religion and insanity in America from colonial times to 1900

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2013.This dissertation is a historical study of "religious insanity," a concept that was common in both popular and medical opinion in England and America from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Religious insanity was based on the assumption that certain religious beliefs and practices, when carried to emotional extremes, could produce attacks of insanity in individuals who were already predisposed to mental illness by temperament, heredity, or childhood upbringing. The concept endured for more than two hundred years, in part because it was associated with the political and sectarian conflicts in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in part because certain tenets of Christian theology formed the theoretical foundation of psychological medicine for much of the nineteenth century. In Great Britain the Anglican establishment used the concept as a polemical tactic to discredit and repress religious nonconformity. In America it was used by opponents of experiential religion to discredit the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakening and other unconventional religious movements such as Millerism and spiritualism. The concept of religious insanity fell into disuse in the latter half of the nineteenth century because of liberalizing trends in Protestant theology, changes in the purpose and conduct of religious revivals, and the secularization of psychological medicine. This study makes extensive use of the annual reports of nineteenth-century American asylums and the patient medical records of asylums in New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, in order to examine the perspectives of asylum physicians and of patients whose insanity was attributed to religious causes. It also examines the role of chaplains in asylums, the use of religious worship as an element of therapy, and the extent to which asylum physicians provided religious counseling to patients. Finally, it presents statistical tables derived from asylum reports in order to examine patterns in religious insanity admissions throughout the nineteenth century