Dorothea Dix Quotes

In the United States, the person who led the fight to reform treatment of the mentally ill and to develop asylums was Dorothea Dix. Often neglected in history, Dix was a nurse

But the truth is the highest consideration.

You never saw a very busy person who was unhappy.

The future will be decided in a thousand American urban neighborhoods and suburban conference centers and small-town church basements and library meeting rooms and rural kitchens... The future of mental health reform will depend upon whether enough people gather in enough of such venues as these to contemplate work of Dorothea Dix by joining to reject and extinguish our modern Bedlams, and replace these Bedlams with a reborn and more sophisticated and more enduring program of moral care. It will depend upon whether enough people will take notice of and be inspired by the rediscovery made by sociologists and psychiatrists: that kindness, companionship, and intimate care are demonstrable counterforces to deepening psychosis. Not cures, but counterforces, particularly when practiced in concert with psychotropic regimens that fit the specific nature of a person's affliction as well as that person's specific biosystem.

Among them was a recent widow, roughly twenty-seven, who had succeeded in convincing Pinkerton that women could be just effective as men, and often more so. Pinkerton later remembered Kate Warne as “a commanding person, with clear-cut, expressive features, and with an ease of manner that was quite captivating at times.” She was a “brilliant conversationalist” who could be “quite vivacious” but also understood “that rarer quality: the art of being silent.” For all of these reasons, she was a perfect spy. Like Dorothea Dix, Warne would play a large but unsung role in protecting Lincoln.119

Dr. Torrey often mentions how the North Carolina mental hospital that reformer Dorothea Dix had founded in 1856 closed in October 2016 and was replaced by a jail on the very same plot of land.

In the mid-1800s, American activist Dorothea Dix deployed her sizable inheritance to devote herself to these issues with a fierceness of purpose that hasn’t been matched since. She traveled more than thirty thousand miles across America in three years to reveal the brutalities wrought upon the mentally ill, describing “the saddest picture of human suffering and degradation,” a woman tearing off her own skin, a man forced to live in an animal stall, a woman confined to a belowground cage with no access to light, and people chained in place for years. Clearly, the American system hadn’t improved much on Europe’s old “familial” treatments. Dix, a tireless advocate, called upon the Massachusetts legislature to take on the “sacred cause” of caring for the mentally unwell during a time when women were unwelcome in politics. Her efforts helped found thirty-two new therapeutic asylums on the philosophy of moral treatment. Dorothea Dix died in 1887, the same year that our brave Nellie Bly went undercover on Blackwell Island, in essence continuing Dix’s legacy by exposing how little had truly changed.