Family influence and psychiatric care: Physical treatments in Devon mental hospitals, c. 1920 to the 1970s☆

'What is it that appears to make the mentally ill so vulnerable to therapeutic experimentation?'(1) One commentator wrote in the 1990s, regarding mental hospitals as repressive, coercive and custodial institutions where medical staff subjected patients to orgies of experimentation. A careful study of surviving documents of the Devon County Lunatic Asylum (DCLA), however, paints a different picture. Rather than medical staff, patients' relatives and the wider community exercised a considerable influence over a patient's hospital admission and discharge, rendering the therapeutic regime in the middle of the 20th century the result of intense negotiations between the hospital and third parties.