"The poor wretches in the cells were chained by the neck to the bars of the grated windows."

A lot of people in the world are still treated horribly, but it was even worse in the past. An excerpt from a report about progress from the February 5, 1893 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Men who have the honor and pleasure of attending a dancing party at the Flatbush lunatic asylum, where the agreeable company assembles for music, singing, dancing and social converse, can hardly conceive of the lunatic asylum of one hundred years ago. Bad as was the prison, the asylum was far worse. It was more hopeless, as the inmates were more helpless. In the middle ages the lunatics were supposed to be possessed of devils and all sorts of tortures were applied to them to oust the fiendish tenants of their bodies. As this belief in the supernatural cause of insanity gave way the maniac came to be regarded in the light of a savage wild beast. Before the establishment of asylums the insane were kept in cages in the market town. Their delusions were the subject of much amusement to the market folks and all kinds of plans were tried to cure them. One physician of Elizabeth’s day gravely recommended rotating cages, like those in which squirrels are confined, the idea being to shake the lunatic up so thoroughly as to stir his brains up, just as a clock is sometimes shaken to set it going.

When asylums were established at first they were merely huge cages, where those who were looked upon as human wild beasts were confined. Society’s idea then was confinement, just that and nothing more. The consequence was brutality and degradation so appalling that when the result of the parliamentary investigation was known in England in 1815 people deemed it hardly credible.

"I never saw nature subdued to such lowliness."

In Dr. Madden’s ‘Travels in Europe,’ is the following upon the subjects of asylums in Cairo, Egypt, as it was in 1840: ‘I was led from one passage to another, door after door was unbarred, the keeper armed himself with a kourbash, a whip with a thong of hippopotamus hide, and we at length got into the open court, round which the dungeons of the lunatics were situated. Some who were not violent were walking unfettered, but the poor wretches in the cells were chained by the neck to the bars of the grated windows. The keeper went round as he would in a menagerie of wild beasts, rattling the chain at the window to rouse the inmates and dragging them by it when they were tardy in approaching. One madman, who spat at me as I passed his cell, I saw the keeper pull by his chain and knock his head against the bars till blood issued from his nose. I forced him to desist. Each of them, as we passed, called out for food. I inquired about their allowance and to my horror I heard that there was none except what charitable people were pleased to afford them from day to day. It was now noon and they had no food from the preceding morning.

‘Two well dressed Turkish women brought in, while I was there, a large water melon and two cakes of bread. This was broken into pieces and thrown to the famished creatures. I never saw nature subdued to such lowliness. They devoured what they got like hungry tigers, some of them thrusting their tongues through the bars, others screaming for more bread. I sent for a few piastres’ worth of bread, dates and some milk. Its arrival was hailed with a yell of ecstasy that pierced the very soul. I thought they would have torn down the iron bars to get at the provisions, and in spite of the kourbash, their eagerness to get their portions rendered it a difficult matter to get our hands out of their clutches. It was humiliation to humanity to see these poor wretches tearing their food with their filthy fingers. Some of their nails were so long as to resemble the talons of a hawk.'”