16. http://mysite.verizon.net/wsbainbridge/dl/relinsan.htm
Religious Insanity in America:
The Official Nineteenth-Century Theory
William Sims Bainbridge, Harvard University
Sociological Analysis 1984, 45, 3:223-240
ABSTRACT

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, psychiatrists and ordinary citizens agreed that one of the chief causes of mental illness was religious excitement. Discovery of hitherto untouched data from the 1860 census, giving supposed cause of insanity for 2,258 inmates of 17 asylums, provides the opportunity for exploring the alleged role of religion in producing insanity. Enshrined in publications of the U.S. government and in the chief psychiatric texts as part of the official theory of madness, the idea of religious insanity may have served a number of functions for the new profession of psychiatry, as well as offering afflicted families an optimistic interpretation of mental problems. A mixture of medical, moral and religious ideas, the dominant psychiatric theory cast opposition to high-tension, sectarian religion in an apparently scientific context.
Religious Insanity in America
On July 16,1860, William S. Allen languished in the Tennessee state asylum at Nashville, a victim of religious excitement. A forty-five year old tailor from Virginia, Mr. Alien had been committed the year before and was but one of the 212 inmates and 30 staff who lived at the hospital. Rebecca Hester, fifty-two, was also a Virginia native driven mad by religion, while Ann J. Pickett, the wife of a physician, had lost her sanity to the Spiritualism craze of the 1850s. Methodist-Episcopal preacher, Thomas B. Craighead, was not among the 11 inmates crazed by religion, because his affliction was supposed to be hereditary. We know these intimate facts because Dr. William A. Cheatham, director of the institution, told them to Davidson County assistant marshal J. B. Corley when he came to count the residents for the 1860 census.
When I first discovered such records, quite by accident, I assumed that Cheatham or Corley had taken it upon himself to add these tidbits of information to an otherwise dull enumeration of the population. But then I found similarly rich reports from other institutions, learning, for example, that a victim of religious excitement known only as Moses wandered the halls of the asylum at Stockton, California. Further research revealed it was the official policy of the federal government to tabulate causes of insanity at the 1860 census and that the official psychiatric theory of the time considered religious excitement to be an important source of psychopathology.
Microfilm copies of the original census enumeration schedules are now available at a dozen federal archives around the country, and a growing body of social-scientific research has exploited this unexpectedly rich trove of data (Laslett, 1977; Johnson, 1978; Perlmann, 1979; Hirata, 1979; Bainbridge, 1982). A guide book recently published by the Bureau of the Census (1979) purports to give the full instructions to enumerators in 1860, but in fact this is an eviscerated abridgement. A graduate student, Lucia Benaquisto, has unearthed a copy of the extensive original instructions which state, in part:
In all cases of insane persons, you will write in the space where you enter the word "Insane," the cause of such insanity; and you will in every case inquire into the cause or origin thereof, and write the word - as intemperance, spiritualism, grief, affliction, hereditary, misfortune, etc. As nearly every case of insanity may be traced to some known cause, it is earnestly desired that you will not fail to make your return in this respect as perfect as possible. (Department of the Interior, 1860:16-17)
The instruction does not suggest religion, per se, but does name spiritualism, the prominent religious deviance of the 1850s. The published volume of summary statistics for the 1860 census (Kennedy, 1864) contains a long essay on insanity, written under the direction of the distinguished alienist and social scientist, Pliny Earle. Here, in the widely-read official report of the best social statistics of the time, the theory that religious excitement often caused insanity was stated at length and presented as fact.
However, only a single table of data from the 1860 enumeration of the insane was published, merely giving their numbers by state, "slave" and "free" A table reporting the supposed causes of insanity in a large number of cases came not from the census but from hospital reports previously summarized in a popular almanac (Earle, 1863). Apparently, the rich information about supposed cause recorded by the enumerators was never tabulated, and one purpose of this article is to bring these interesting data to scientific attention for the first time.
Of course, we need not accept the theory of mental illness reflected in the nineteenth-century etiological judgments. Indeed, the chief contemporary use of these data is ethnographic: to help us understand the theory of insanity which prevailed over a century ago and learn the role which religion played in it. While no society achieves full consensus in its views of madness (Edgerton, 1966; Finkel, 1976), the theory of religious insanity had the status of official truth for more than fifty years - promulgated by the leading psychiatrists and social scientists, accepted by popular media like the almanacs from which opinion leaders took their information, and enshrined by the census as the official position of the United States government.
Today, there are several theories about how religion might produce mental illness. Freudians tend to view religious dogmas as inherently delusional, thereby being the stuff of which madness is made (Freud, 1927, 1930; Roheim, 1955; La Barre, 1969, 1972; cf. Stark, 1971; Richardson, 1980). Kiev and Francis (1964) suggested that unresolved guilt aroused by deviant religious groups might undermine mental health, and other writers have emphasized the power of intense religious experiences (Allison, 1968). Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists often are among the most vehement opponents of contemporary cults, and the general public has been bombarded with pseudoscientific claims that deviant religion is psychopathological (e.g. Conway and Siegelman, 1979; cf. Kilbourne, 1983).
Psychiatric theories may serve four functions, quite apart from their capacity to explain the cold facts about insanity known at the time of their popularity. First, they may assist professionals in asserting special claims to power and status (Hollingshead and Redlich, 1958:163; Strauss et al., 1964). Second, they may be used as rhetorical tools to discredit political opponents and members of disvalued classes or subcultures (Gursslin et al., 1959; Goode, 1969; Medvedev and Medvedev, 1971). Third, they may be used as media through which the culture consensually expresses and modifies its basic conceptions of human nature and social values (Benedict, 1934; Ackerknecht, 1943; Opler, 1959; Edgerton, 1966; Bastide, 1972; Kiev, 1972). And fourth, they may provide legitimation for humane treatment and hope for patients and their families (Szasz, 1961; Parsons, 1964; cf. Haley, 1963). It may be that the theory of religious insanity served each of these.
Sociologists have long argued that science itself may have cultural roots in the very religious tradition to which the nineteenth-century alienists belonged (Westfall, 1958; Merton, 1970), and until the end of the period under consideration here, religion worked through science as much as against it (Gillispie, 1959; Toulmin, 1982). Religion provided Americans with an interpretive framework for understanding man and society, yet it was slowly giving way to secular perspectives. The alienists mixed piety and science in a way which aided this transition while condemning religious deviance, raising the alienists in status, and giving comfort to many sufferers.
This article will examine the newly discovered 1860 data on supposed cause of insanity, together with comparable statistics found in official reports and scientific publications of the time, in the light of these hypotheses. We will learn the psychological theory that encouraged alienists to believe that religion can cause nervous breakdowns, and we will consider a number of social functions this conclusion may have served.
Statistics on Religious Insanity
Persons labeled insane are found throughout the 1860 census manuscripts, and cases attributed to religion appear in many different residential contexts. For example, Moses Smith, a thirty-five year old shoemaker driven mad by religious excitement lived at the town poorhouse of Monson, Massachusetts. Galen Weston, a farmer who lived at home with his wife Judith in Duxbury, Massachusetts, had lost his wits to Spiritualism. While such cases are numerous, nationwide, they are rare in any given town, and a search for a large sample of uninstitutionalized insane would be prohibitively expensive. But in 1860 there were forty-two major insane asylums in the United States, and I was able to locate census records for every single one of them.
Despite the care with which the assistant marshals generally did their work, supposed cause is not given for twenty-four asylums. I think the cumbersomeness of the hospital records often made it very difficult to extract special information except in a concerted study such as the occasional statistical reports prepared by asylum directors or treasurers. Such reports typically described the patients who had been admitted during a given year, or all those admitted since the founding of the institution, while the census wanted data on the inmates present on the day of enumeration. Several of the asylums which do not give cause in the 1860 census did so in their own publications, and they may have found it far too inconvenient to redo the work on short notice for the census taker.
In one case, the Auburn Asylum for Insane Convicts in New York, the criminal offense of each inmate is named instead of cause of insanity, the enumerator having followed the instruction to report offense and date of conviction for all prisoners. The federal microfilms were not completely legible for the asylum at Taunton, Massachusetts, but a duplicate handwritten copy preserved in the Boston State House provided these data. Thus, for seventeen major asylums we now know what was believed to have caused insanity in 2,258 cases.
The summary volume of the 1860 census gave the supposed cause for fully 9,473 admissions to four hospitals in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Of these, 740 or 7.8 percent were attributed to "religious excitement" (Kennedy, 1864:lxxxix). These data span three decades or more, and some individual patients were counted more than once because of readmissions to the hospital. Data from the seventeen asylums in 1860 represent a wider range of asylums, including recently built institutions in southern or western areas of the country, and they count actual persons, without duplication, at a single point in time. However, hospital reports are valuable both because they reach back further in time and because they were public expressions of professional psychiatric ideology aimed at political leaders and the general public.
Table 1 gives the percent of cases attributed to religion in approximately fifteen thousand cases, data taken from two of the most comprehensive hospital reports, three almanacs contemporary with the 1860 census, and the census itself.

Chandler Yergin at 5:07PM on Mar 29th 2008

17. Anna wrote: "Thought is energy, energy CAN and does affect us every day. Magic by any other name."

Knowledge and science tell us through experiemtnation that energy that could affect us can be measured and then it needs to be of an intensity that can actually have an effect us (above the background level, that we can agree might have a general effect, or not). Energy that is intense enough to travel from an antagonist to a victim must then interact/interfere with our internal systems in a coherent and/or substantive way in order to accomplish its good or evil purpose. Ether cannot affect us.

magellan at 5:44PM on Mar 29th 2008

18. THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT.

The movie: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-871902797772997781&q

PROFESSOR X at 9:57AM on Mar 31st 2008