Brief historical overview of Danish psychiatry

In Denmark organised psychiatric treatment dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the first asylum, now Sct. Hans Hospital, which opened in a former manor house in Roskilde southwest of Copenhagen, serving the capital, Copenhagen. In 1852 the asylum idea had gained much ground, and a new asylum was established north of Aarhus, the second largest town in Denmark. The asylum was built for the purpose and was designed by one of the leading Danish architects. It is my opinion that the ideas behind the asylums were far more epochmaking and visionary compared with the organisation, practice, knowledge and attitudes dominating in the mid-1800s than anything else which has been seen in psychiatric organisation since then. The asylum model dominated in Denmark until the Second World War.

Denmark had a psychiatric law (1938) and a social reform (1933),however, without a radical change in the concept of treatment. In Denmark this period was marked by the same progress within treatment as the rest of Europe, progress that I will not mention here, but a specifically new way of thinking which resulted in an important treatment facility, namely home care. Long-term patients from the psychiatric hospitals lived with private families, often farmers, under the inspection of the hospitals. This model faded out in the 1960s and the 1970s.

The asylum model was still in use in the post-war period when we in Denmark, in parallel with the beginning of the psychopharmacological era at the end of the 1950s, started establishing psychiatric departments at the general hospitals.