I spent a good part of the March break in Quebec City this year, and while I was there, I met a girl l have not been able to forget. While dancing with her one night, I glanced down, and I couldn’t fail to notice the raised pink scars lining the inside of her arm. Later I saw that her hips were also marked with the very same parallel ridges. I didn’t mention it, and neither did she. One look in her eyes, and I could tell she knew.
Only a few days later, I learned that one of my closest friends has been suffering with anorexia for months.
With all of these things happening at once, mental health (depression, eating disorders, schizophrenia) has definitely been on my mind. In this blog post, I’d like to take a look back into the history of mental health, and maybe even try to guess what lies ahead.
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| 1800s Asylum |
From problems with the gods, to Prozac, the way society sees mental health has shifted drastically over the course of our history. Ancient peoples usually thought that mental illness came from the gods or demons. Charms, hexes, and ointments were seen as the best way to treat these problems. The only light in this dark age was the Greek Hippocrates who classified paranoia, epilepsy, mania and melancholia. In the middle ages, people who were mentally ill were believed to have demons inside them, and they were killed. Joan of Arc, the warrior maiden who liberated France from British occupation, heard voices inside her head that she believed were holy. The church inquisitors believed her to be possessed by a demon and she was burned at the stake.
From the Renaissance through to the late nineteenth century, confinement, institutionalization and torture were seen as the best treatment for deviants from society. Insane asylums were very profitable businesses at the time. Some owners would even let people pay a penny to see the patients being abused. Harsh treatments and restraints were seen as therapeutic. It was not until very recently that we started to try digging into the root cause and possible solutions to the widespread mental illness in our world.
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| Ashley Smith |
Psychoanalysis and prescription antidepressants now dominate the mental health landscape. The mental health facilities now are much different from the ones of the past, and far more effective. However, we still know little about these illnesses of the mind. Our treatments are far from perfect, as proved by the sad case of Ashley Smith who was in solitary confinement 23 hours a day at the Kitchener prison for women, and repeatedly choked herself with cloth strips. It seems clear that prison authorities had no idea how to help her. I hope that, in the future, we will have a good enough understanding of the brain to be able to identify and treat these diseases.
In the words of Cardinal Roger Mahoney, "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members -- the last, the least, the littlest." Maybe one day, we will be able to say with pride that even those who are so ill that they can’t function in society are receiving the treatment they need. I hope that day is not too far off.
