My boyfriend and I just watched The Homesman. If you're not familiar with this movie here's the IMDB. Basically, the setup is that three women are driven insane by frontier life and have to be taken away to (presumably?) an asylum. It's horribly sad. Can't say I recommend it for a date.
My boyfriend is convinced that there is some record of something like this happening, but I can't find anything that says this really happened. Do we know if it was common for women (or people in general) to be driven insane by the harshness of life on the frontier? Would they have been transported long distances to an asylum of some kind or would they have stayed with their families? If you've seen the movie, how accurate is this depiction?
There is a term that was popular during this time called Prairie Madness mainly in fictional writings but also in non fiction, that referred to a general mental breakdown due to harsh conditions on the frontier. Frontier life was difficult, witnessing death was common along the road west especially due to cholera and malaria. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know if mental breakdowns and general "insanity" that occurred sometimes was simply because of the difficulty and depressing factors of the westward journey or underlying conditions. Many people who went west did so with little money, often using most of what they had to finance the trip, spending it on wagons, livestock, food, and other necessary supplies. During the 1800's, many mentally ill people in the US were committed to asylums for various conditions (hysteria being a common one among women.) However, it would have been difficult and expensive to send a woman back east to an asylum once a family had started west, especially before the railroads were built across the country and running, so it would not have been very common. They would stay with their families. People with severe mental disabilities such as schizophrenics or people in a manic episode in the west would likely be restrained by other family members or hidden from company or both. Suicide by people with a mental illness was not very common, but did happen.