Madness: A Brief History (15 page)

The noisiest patients were shunted off into the back wards, and all too often those who were shut up were, indeed, ‘shut up’—or at least nobody attended to what they were uttering, there being less communication than excommunication. Visiting an Irish lunatic asylum around 1850, the inspectors were buttonholed by an inmate alleging theft: ‘they took my language from me.’ Similarly, the Romantic poet John Clare, locked up for several decades in various institutions, evolved a new language for his verse. Asked his reason, he responded:

‘Why,’ said he, ‘they have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet—all the vowels and consonants—and brought them out through the ears; and then they want me to write poetry! I can’t do it.’

Such protesters were not alone. John Perceval, author of
A Narrative of the Treatment Received by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement
(1838), perhaps the most perceptive and poignant account ever written by an ex-patient about asylum life, voiced similar grievances. While a student at Oxford, Perceval, son of the assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, had undergone conversion to an extreme evangelical Protestant sect, which held that the Holy Ghost spoke pentecostally through believers, in a tongue resembling classical Greek. Soon he was being assailed by a pandemonium of voices, demonic no less than divine. Judged deranged by his family, he was confined to an asylum, which at least had the advantage that ‘I might hollo or sing as my spirits commanded me’.

During his eighteen-month sojourn in two expensive and esteemed asylums, Perceval was to discover that (such was his experience) the medical staff never listened to his requests and barely addressed him as a human being—let alone as an English gentleman. He retaliated by holding his tongue. In the ensuing hostile silence,

men acted as though my body, soul, and spirit were fairly given up to their control, to work their mischief and folly upon. My silence, I suppose, gave consent. I mean, that I was never told, such and such things we are going to do; we think it advisable to administer such and such medicine, in this or that manner; I was never asked, Do you want any thing? do you wish for, prefer any thing? have you any objection to this or to that?

He was treated throughout, he accused, ‘as if I were a piece of furniture, an image of wood, incapable of desire or will as well as judgement’. This refusal of the authorities to communicate with him proved, he was convinced, therapeutically counter-productive.

Similar experiences have been recorded by any number of ex-patients. In an exposé edited by two British Members of Parliament in 1957 and entitled
A Plea for the Silent
—perhaps
silenced
is better—one former inmate records the experience of ostracism in a mental institution:

I was not allowed to write to my best friend to tell her where to locate me. ... [T]he staff ignored me... I thought that this technique must be a new method devised for the study of mental illness; but I was soon to learn that it appeared to be nothing but a callous belief that the insane do not suffer and that any problems they may express are bound to be ‘imaginary’.

Numerous mad people’s memoirs have claimed that there is (in Perceval’s phrase) ‘reasonableness in lunacy’, that their thoughts are coherent and ought to be heeded. What trust, however, may be vested in the testimony of such crazy people? The manuscript autobiography, all half-million words of it, of the seventeenth-century Whig grandee, Goodwin Wharton, assures us that he impregnated his mistress, Mary Parish, 106 times, that he had liaisons with three queens of England, and that the Almighty personally instructed him to repopulate the kingdom.

And whom do we believe when we are faced with contested versions of reality? In his
The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital
(1818), Urbane Metcalf, a former inmate who claimed he was heir to the Danish throne, painted Bethlem as corrupt and brutalizing. For their part, the Hospital’s records identify him as a trouble-maker. In such cases, historians must read between the lines and judge for themselves: contested readings of reality afford windows onto inter-subjectivities that never were univocal. Take Freud’s Wolf Man, the Russian aristocrat Sergius P. He crops up three times, initially in Freud’s 1920 analysis of his dream of white wolves with bushy tails, psychoanalytically decoded into a memory of the ‘primal scene’, his parents having sexual intercourse in his presence while he was a toddler. He next appears in a discussion of his subsequent analysis conducted by Ruth Mack Brunswick, herself analysed by Freud, in a volume with an introduction by Anna Freud (also analysed by her father), which claims the success of both Freudian analyses of Sergius. And finally, in the 1960s, he was interviewed by a journalist, Karin Obholzer. What, asked the reporter, did he make of Freud’s reading of his dream? ‘It’s terribly far-fetched’, responded Sergius. Wolf Man III has a very different tenor, but neither Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’, nor Mack Brunswick’s ‘Wolf Man’, nor the Wolf Man’s ‘Wolf Man’ is to be taken at face value. Alerted thus to the dangers of monotonal readings, let us scrutinize the mind of an asylum patient, in part through his own words, as recorded by his physician.

Confused signals

James Tilley Matthews was a London tea merchant. Flushed, like Wordsworth, by the French Revolution’s new dawn, he crossed to Paris in 1793. Deploring the outbreak of war between England and France, he got it into his head to mount a personal peace mission. Following an audience with Lord Liverpool, a senior minister in Pitt’s administration, Matthews prepared to negotiate with the French authorities, but the Jacobin seizure of power wrecked his plans, and they had him clapped in jail.

Eventually released, he made his way back to England in March 1796, convinced that he alone was privy to a dastardly French plot for ‘surrendering to the French every secret of the British government, as for the republicanizing Great Britain and Ireland’. The secret weapon the French were mobilizing was Mesmerism, then all the rage in Paris. Teams of ‘magnetic spies’ had infiltrated England. Armed with ‘air-looms’, machines for transmitting waves of ‘animal magnetism’, they were stationing themselves in strategic sites ‘near the Houses of Parliament, Admiralty, Treasury, etc.’, where they would hypnotize members of the administration, so as to render them ‘possessed’, under a ‘spell, like puppets’.

Being privy to all this, Matthews became Number One on the conspirators’ hit list. A ‘gang of seven’, he alleged, had been sent to wipe him out, using their hypnotic ‘science of assailment’ to deploy tortures which included such atrocities as ‘foot-curving, lethargy-making, spark-exploding, knee-nailing, burning out, eye-screwing, sight-stopping, roof-stringing, vital-tearing, fibre-ripping, etc.’. These threats to his life explained the urgency with which, on his return, Matthews sent warnings to Lord Liverpool, divulging the Jacobin plots. The minister must have been silent or sceptical, for Matthews tried a follow-up letter to him on 6 December 1796, which opened, ‘I pronounce your Lordship to be in every sense of the word a most diabolical Traitor.’

Sensing Liverpool’s ‘treachery’, Matthews proceeded to the House of Commons where he accused the Ministry of ‘perfidious venality’. Examined before the Privy Council, he was committed in January 1797, his family’s protests of his sanity being overridden by the Lord Chancellor.

Confined in Bethlem, Matthews felt utterly at the mercy of his persecutors. He turned to the universe for redress, penning a document beginning ‘James, Absolute, Sole, Supreme, Sacred, Omni-Imperious, Arch-Grand, Arch-Sovereign ... Arch Emperor’, and offering rewards beyond the dreams of avarice to those who would assassinate his foes and secure his release, beginning at the bottom with ‘three hundred thousand pounds sterling’ for the head of the king of Norway and Denmark, and rising to a million pounds for the czar, a million for the emperor of China and the king of Spain, and so forth. Matthews gave directions as to method (‘I shall prefer the Hanging them by the Neck till dead and afterwards Publickly burning them’), while apologizing for the barbarity of it all. It was, he explained, ‘unfortunate for me ... to have to put to death any one whomsoever’; yet necessity compelled him ‘to punish rather than pity’.

But he remained inside. In 1809 his family pressed again for his release, and two distinguished physicians, Drs Birkbeck and Clutterbuck, testified to his sanity. They were opposed by the Bethlem medical staff, who argued that he was as obsessed as ever, ‘sometimes an automaton moved by the agency of persons, or, at others, the Emperor of the whole world, hurling from their thrones the usurpers of his dominions’.

The best way to prove Matthews’s continuing delusional state and the need for his detention, believed John Haslam, Bethlem’s apothecary, was to let the patient speak for himself: and so he published Matthews’s own story, taken from documents penned by his patient, in a mischievous volume entitled
Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of an Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate
(1810).

Here, as Haslam’s title hinted, was yet another case in which not only the
mad
but the
mad-doctors
too could not see reason. ‘Madness being the opposite of reason and good sense, as light is to darkness, straight to crooked, etc.’, Haslam added with a palpable sneer, ‘it appears wonderful that two opposite opinions could be entertained on the subject’: were Clutterbuck and Birkbeck as mad as Matthews?

Matthews spent several more years in Bethlem—in fact, it was not he but Haslam who was ‘released’. When Parliament enquired into the state of English madhouses in 1815, Bethlem was discovered to be riddled with corruption—Haslam himself testified that its physician, John Monro, was an absentee and its recently deceased surgeon Bryan Crowther had for some years been so drunk and demented as to require a strait-jacket. Haslam was victimized, carpeted, and dismissed in 1816.

Perhaps this experience turned his mind, for later in life, the mad-doctor saw the whole of society as crazy. Testifying in court in an insanity plea, he contended that not only was the accused mad, but so too was everyone else—perhaps the only exception was Almighty God Himself (he had been reassured of God’s soundness of mind, he respectfully added, on the authority of eminent Church of England divines). As mediated by Haslam, Matthews’s story is thus one of mirrors and doubles: everyone is in his own turn deceiver and deceived, deranged and distrustful to the point of paranoia. Reason has become infinitely elusive.

Protest

Throughout the writings of the insane runs a wail of protest. Authors claim they were never crazy in the first place, or that they became mad only through the barbaric treatment meted out to them. As confinement increased, patients’ protests grew with it. Cries went up from former inmates vindicating their sanity and alleging victimization by sinister foes, in publications ranging from the (already discussed) poetry of James Carkesse, to indictments by lesser-known figures.

Samuel Bruckshaw was a Stamford (Lincolnshire) merchant who in 1770 had a series of brushes with local officials. A conspiracy had been formed against him, he believed, to cheat him out of his property. His enemies, he records, then had him forcibly bundled off by two surgeons, who drove him to Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire, where he was confined in Wilson’s private asylum and ‘kept prisoner’ for some nine months in an attic without a fire, abused by the attendants, poorly fed, and denied exercise. His letters were intercepted, though ultimately he secured release through the good offices of his brother. No pretence to treatment was offered.

Bruckshaw then vindicated himself in two pamphlets, 
The Case, Petition and Address of Samuel Bruckshaw, who 
Suffered a Most Severe Imprisonment for Very Nearly a Whole Year
(1774), and
One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses,
published in the same year. Interpreting them poses deep problems. Bruckshaw presents himself as a lamb led to the slaughter by diabolical conspiracies hatched by his fellow citizens. Yet his tone is, to say the least, fractious, suspicious, and litigious. And though he upholds his sanity, he records that while confined he had heard disembodied voices. In this and many similar cases, it would take a bold psycho-historian to judge whether such writings reveal persecution, paranoia, or both.

In
A Mind That Found Itself
(1908), Clifford Beers established himself as an all-American boy, of a ‘truly American’ family, descended from the earliest settlers. Born in New Haven in 1876, he went into business. Then calamity struck: he became ‘neurasthenic’, that distinctively American disease discussed in Chapter 6. Debilitated and distraught, in the summer of 1901 he made a half-hearted suicide attempt. Obviously, concluded his family, he needed treatment, and he was removed to Stamford Hall, a private ‘sanatorium’. Until then, the young man had simply been neurasthenic; now he began to suffer hallucinations, believing he was the victim of an insidious conspiracy: those masquerading as his family were actually detectives in disguise.

As Beers later recalled, his paranoia was daily vindicated by his experiences. The callous treatment he received seemed like malicious torture, which would ‘drive a sane man to violence’. ‘My attendants’, he wrote, much in the vein of Perceval, ‘were incapable of understanding the operations of my mind, and what they could not understand they would seldom tolerate.’ Everyone took his insanity as an invitation to brutality. In reality, Beers insisted, it would readily respond to reason.

It received none. Yet he recovered somewhat. In 1901, he spent some months with a private attendant, but was then placed in 1902 in the Hartford Retreat, another private but cheaper asylum which in its better days (see Chapter 5) had pioneered moral therapy. Beers continued to be driven by his delusions: he was under ‘police surveillance’ in an asylum full of ‘detectives feigning insanity’; his food was poisoned, his ‘friends’ and ‘family’ just police stooges.