With thanks to MyGrimmBrother at Deviant Art http://fav.me/d5jqtcj
“I have only just realised that I am actually in a lunatic asylum,” wrote 23-year-old law student James.
“Who on earth ordered the cabman to drive me here?”
Who indeed. James’s letter was sent, more than a century ago, to to secure his release from the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in Morningside.
His letter is one of 1000, written by patients between 1873 and 1908, which were revisited by Dr Alan Beveridge in preparation for a talk ‘Voices Of The Mad’ given in March 2013.
Victorian asylums were a considerable improvement on their predecessors. They were the subject of the gothically titled Mad House Act of 1774. Before that, anyone could make a business of shutting up the mad so no one had to look at them, and they were grim unregulated places as a whole.
But the Mad House Act brought in licensing of such places, and yearly inspections. In 1792 with William Tuke’s York Retreat folks began to whisper the unthinkable: that beautiful surroundings and some leisure and pleasure might be the best treatment for those whose minds were broken.
Yet: If you take a castellated mansion, and landscape it in a style something akin to heaven, it is still a place where broken minds live and you suffer an infringement of liberty.
And there is always the possibility that you should not be there at all.
Define mad.
“An individual, having unusual difficulties in coping with his environment struggles and kicks up the dust, as it were. I have used the figure of a fish caught on a hook: his gyrations must look peculiar to other fish that don’t understand the circumstances; but his splashes are not his affliction, they are his effort to get rid of his affliction and as every fisherman knows these efforts may succeed.”
These words are American psychiatrist Karl Menninger’s.
It might be foolish to watch the fish thrashing around on the hook, completely and blithely oblivious to the pressures of the struggle that creature is facing.
Ignoring someone like this also means we choose to ignore the wisdom of engaging with them. The fisherman may not have completed his day’s fishing, and we could be next.
Today I am not drawing conclusions. Today, rather, I have a final story.
Really, it is simply a quote from RM Renfield, an unassuming solicitor who was sent on a routine trip to Transylvannia to close some London property deals with an East European aristocrat named Count Dracula.
The little solicitor fell to Dracula’s plans and we meet him in one of the aforesaid London institutions, quite mad; or tormented by a Prince of Darkness, whichever you choose.
” I am speaking,” he tells his doctor,” from the depths of my heart—of my very soul. You don’t know whom you wrong, or how; and I may not tell. … Can’t you understand? Will you never learn? Don’t you know that I am sane and earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul? “
Kate Shrewsday 
So, do you have any idea what happened to dear law student James? What became of him? “The Lunatic Act” sounds very, I don’t know, gothic in and of itself. A good title for a dark novel.
You do find the most tantalizing morsels.
Alas, Michael, these letters were intercepted; and it was deemed for the good of the patient that they were never sent. Your rights were utterly signed away. Terrifying, really.You can read about all the letters in an article in the Scotsman here: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/letters-tell-of-life-inside-victorian-mental-asylum-1-2811775#axzz3oBVectsc
So if you were indeed a sane person confined, there wouldn’t be much chance of you getting out. In which case you would end up going insane thereby justifying your stay.
Sad documents, never to reach their addressees.
There are some extremely scary stories to this day of misdiagnosed people, or mistaken identity, where once admitted the person has the devil’s own job of convincing the institution that they are as normal as anyone can be. Then, of course, one gathers that NHS or whoever has been trying to save costs on institutions, and restoring to general currency some who are truly not in the sort of right mind you would want to have near you. Those responsible for THAT should be committed.
Quite, Col. Budgetary considerations must have had a very large part to play, I think. It is criminal, leaving our most vulnerable without the support they need to thrive.
ACK! What a scary place to wake up . . .
So your blog updates are coming to me in Hebrew! Right to left, etc. must be something I did as you blog looks fine to me. Very odd. But entertaining!
Hebrew! What will WordPress think of next…..I’ll have a word with the Happiness Engineers, Michael 🙂
It must have been nightmarish, Nancy…
I think asylums worldwide have a history of the most horrible abuses. I would love to know a lot more about this poor solicitor and his connection to Count Dracula is utterly fascinating! It gives me goosebumps!
The history of how we have managed mental illness is a chequered one, Debra, isn’t it; we know so very little about the mind, its complexities and how it works.The Dracula snippet is one which comes back to me again and again: someone who has been, and continues to be, the subject of terrible abuse, but there’s a ‘wall’ of misunderstanding between poor Renfield and his ‘captors’. Utter impotence, and what must be a very familiar feeling to some.
Defining mad requires a metaphor of a fish. Because we can’t really define it. Its range of behavior is too broad and the sane do all of those same things at various moments. I prefer “functioning” to “sane” most of the time.
Brenda, I hear you…really, we need different terms and ways of talking in this day and age.Functioning. I must remember that.
Maybe it’s an Americanism, coming from the use of the term dysfunctional families. It seems less judgmental than insane to say dysfunctional. But I’m quibbling. 🙂
How fascinating Kate! I would love to read these letters. And I actually adore the definition of mad – causes me to wonder how many times I have come so close, eh?