The archives of the 1800s and early 1900s are filled with brutal accounts of how patients were treated in insane asylums. These stories read like something out of a nightmare, yet they were the daily reality for countless men, women, and children who were labeled “insane” and then subjected to unimaginable cruelty.
Brutal Accounts of Asylum Torture
Below, we walk you through ten of the most harrowing examples, from wooden cages to cold showers, and everything in between.
10 Wooden Cages
Imagine being poor, deemed insane, and then tossed into a wooden cage in the 1870s. A Pennsylvania newspaper, The Carbon Advocate, reported that county almshouses treated the indigent mentally ill with utter disregard. There were no bathrooms, no privacy—just cramped wooden cages.
One case described an agricultural laborer, dressed only in rags, who spent 18 months confined in a cage with straw for bedding. Other inmates were barely clothed, many too weak to move, forced to crouch for days on end.
The report also recounted a 20‑year‑old woman who endured six years in a tiny cage, wearing nothing but a piece of bed‑ticking. She was so weakened by lying that she could not lift her limbs, rise, or walk.
9 Cold Showers
In 1903, the Omaha Daily Bee reported that attendants at Kentucky’s Lakeland Insane Asylum were using cold showers as a weapon. Patients testified that they lived in terror, fearing retaliation if they spoke out.
Victims described being stripped, having cold water dripped over them for punishment, and even being beaten with potato‑filled socks. While hydrotherapy—both hot and cold water—was marketed as a treatment for manic‑depressive psychoses, the temperature range (9 °C to 21 °C) was weaponized to sap patients’ mental and physical energy.
8 Chair Binding
Being strapped to a chair might sound like a scene from a crime drama, but the reality in the 1880s was far more sinister. A newspaper from 1886 recounted a woman suffering from “nervous excitement” who was taken to a state asylum.
After an attendant deliberately tripped her, causing a left‑leg injury, she tried to rest on her bed—an act that violated asylum rules. The staff seized her, placed her in a chair, and bound her so tightly that circulation stopped. She remained restrained from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m.; when finally released, her injured leg had swollen to twice its normal size.
She also endured gagging and had a large amount of her hair ripped out by an attendant.
7 Simulated Drowning
At the Topeka Asylum for the Insane in 1903, the head matron ordered a cruel practice known as the “water cure” against women who refused to obey. An attendant explained the method: a sheet was thrown over the patient’s head, she was dragged to the floor, and the matron poured water from a pan onto her face at a rapid pace.
The torrent continued until the patient submitted. Testimony revealed that this wasn’t an isolated incident; simulated drowning was a routine punishment, prompting a committee investigation into the matron’s conduct.
6 Starvation
Starvation was a grim reality in many asylums. An Illinois report declared that men were “tortured to death, beaten unmercifully, and in many instances starved to death.” In Boston, 1883 testimonies described women and children dying from lack of food.
One harrowing account detailed a woman confined to a dirty attic cell, stripped of clothing, and given only a single daily meal. The attendant tasked with feeding her allegedly discarded the food, returning with an empty plate and claiming the woman had already eaten.
5 Flogged In A Straitjacket
By 1901, a woman finally spoke out about her husband’s treatment at Bellevue Hospital in 1898. She claimed he died from relentless abuse. One vivid recollection described him forced to trot up and down a corridor while restrained in a straitjacket, as an attendant flogged him with a long strap tipped with metal.
Afterward, he was transferred to Manhattan State Hospital, where he suffered fractured ribs. He endured another year and a half of asylum torment before passing away, highlighting how even educated physicians could endorse such barbaric methods.
4 Scalded To Death
Warm baths were touted as therapeutic, but some attendants turned them into a lethal weapon. Patients were sometimes left soaking for hours—or even days—in water heated between 33 °C (92 °F) and 36 °C (97 °F).
In a 1903 Kansas investigation, a patient died from severe scalds received during a bath. The asylum’s records listed the cause of death as “senility,” masking the true tragedy caused by negligence and outright cruelty.
3 Beaten For Not Working
Asylums often forced patients into labor, mirroring penitentiary work details. In 1910, a car clerk witnessed an attendant beating a patient who refused to shovel coal.
The attendant ordered the patient to continue, struck him, knocked him down, and then kicked him repeatedly until he resumed work. The clerk noted that the other patients did not intervene, and he felt it wasn’t his place to intervene either.
2 Head Dunking
In 1878, Columbus, Ohio’s Insane Asylum became the focus of a scandal involving a matron named Mrs. Brown. Though she had experience in Canadian mental hospitals, she instituted a terrifying routine of head dunking for any patient who caused trouble.
Offending patients were stripped, thrown into a bathroom tub, and repeatedly forced under water until they nearly suffocated. The attendant would then raise the patient’s head briefly to allow a moment of recovery before the cycle resumed. Victims were also threatened that any disclosure would result in drowning.
1 Chained And Stamped In The Face
By the late 1800s, some institutions treated patients like prisoners. A 1889 article in The State Chronicle exposed Dr. Grissom’s horrific practices, where patients were chained, had water thrown in their faces, and were kicked or stamped on the head.
Debates raged in 1921 over whether hopelessly insane patients should be mercifully put to death. The Norwich Bulletin reported that legislators were divided on a law that would allow such an ending, but mass murder was ultimately averted.
These brutal accounts serve as a stark reminder of the inhumanity that once pervaded mental health care.