In Europe and North America, the trend of putting the mentally ill into mental hospitals began as early as the 17th century, and hospitals often focused more on "restraining" or controlling inmates than on curing them, although hospital conditions improved somewhat with movements for human treatment, such as
moral management. By the mid-20th century, overcrowding in institutions, the failure of institutional treatment to cure most mental illnesses, and the advent of drugs such as
Thorazine In other words, many of these patients had become "institutionalized" and were unable to adjust to independent living. One of the first studies to address the issue of institutionalization directly was British psychiatrist Russell Barton's 1959 book
Institutional Neurosis, which claimed that many symptoms of mental illness (specifically,
psychosis) were not physical brain defects as once thought, but were consequences of institutions' "stripping" (a term probably first used in this context by
Erving Goffman) away the "psychological crutches" of their patients. Since the middle of the 20th century, the problem of institutionalization has been one of the motivating factors for the increasing popularity of deinstitutionalization and the growth of
community mental health services, since some mental healthcare providers believe that institutional care may create as many problems as it solves. ==Post Institutional Autistic Syndrome==