As long as there has been illness, there has been mental illness. And as long as there has been mental illness, there has been problematic treatment of mental illness.
In 1796, hundreds of years before the advent of modern psychotherapy and medications, a seemingly revolutionary event in the field of mental healthcare management occurred when William Tuke opened the Retreat in York, England. Tuke, a Quaker and an abolitionist, had some new ideas of how to treat mental health. These ideas were reflected into the model of the Retreat, which was a non-profit psychiatric hospital in England dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill through the “Moral Treatment” approach.