The history of psychiatry and institutional mental asylums has attracted considerable attention during recent decades from both social historians and psychiatrists. Each group has contributed to the narrative of the rise of the lunatic asylum and the professionalisation of “psychiatry.” The historical inquiries and the methodological approaches adopted by the two fields have led to interpretations that often question, and conflict with, each other. Social historians have emphasised the need to place “alienists” and the asylum in their social context. This enables changes in social structures and relationships to be determined and their influence on professional interests to be assessed. Psychiatrists, or amateur historians as they are sometimes labelled, have tended to construct their work within a medical model that attempts to legitimise the activities of present day psychiatry.

The literary journals produced by patients were perhaps the most public form of expression from within the asylums. Periodicals could reach a wider audience than tourism, which was a popular practice at the time.

Nineteenth-century asylums evoke terrible images of dark and dirty cells, shrieking lunatics, horrible experiments, and abusive doctors. The disturbing nature of these impressions is not unfounded. Abuse and poor conditions in the United States of America mental institutions have been well documented. Former patients often published sensational exposés to reveal the dark and horrid nature of these secret places. However, for most of the nineteenth-century, the asylum was also conceived of as a beacon of human rights, an enlightened institution to protect and cure the mentally ill. This saintly image was occasionally upheld by the patients themselves, through periodical literature published from within the asylums. The most prolific of these, ‘The Opal’ was written, edited, and printed by patients in the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, and sold to the public for a profit.