Mental Patients in Family Care A Descriptive Study of the Boarding Home Program at the Norwich State Hospital, 1940–1953

Newspaper headlines are the closest many people come to an awareness of the mentally ill. The escape of a potentially dangerous patient or a court battle as to the legal sanity of a defendant is certainly newsworthy. The papers not only form but usually reflect an atmosphere of fear and distrust of mental patients. One author surveying the current scene refers to the “fence that separates us from an empathic and perhaps helpful relationship with the mentally and emotionally ill . Another comments on the “iron curtain between the general public and psychiatry and on “the erroneous idea of a world of mental patients as a land of dark and fearsome places, peopled by grotesque and frightening shadows“. The knowledge of 100,000 patients coming to and leaving mental hospitals in the United States each year gives a more realistic picture. The fact is that with present treatment facilities one person in every twenty will be hospitalized at some period in his life and one in ten will suffer a less severe breakdown. In Connecticut, more than half of all hospital beds are occupied by mental patients and a third to half of those physically ill have ailments closely linked to emotional illness