“Her Parents Are Exhausted and Unable to Ensure her Safety” – Families, Institutions, and Psychiatric Care in France in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The significant increase in the number of internees in French asylums after the “Law on the insane” of 1838 raised the question of the place of the family in the system of psychiatric care. Drawing from medical and administrative literature, as well as from admission registers and patient files from four French public asylums located in the Seine and Finistère departments, this article aims at understanding how the responsibilities for care were delineated before, during, and after internment. It sheds light on the evolutions of psychiatric practices in the last third of the nineteenth century. Prompted by practical constraints as well as by new conceptions of care, these practices allowed for a more sustained cooperation between families and doctors in the processes of commitment and discharge. While the overall role of the family in the sharing of the responsibility for care was increasingly recognized, the article shows that its involvement depended on local arrangements, and on factors such as gender and class.