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Greetings All
Here I am going to introduce you to a lady from Jamaica who has been through the carribean mental health system and has written a book about her experience. Her story covers the way it used to be in the 1800's up untill the present day. Just like here in America, things have gotten better but, we have a long, long road ahead of us.
MENTAL ILLNESS - Images of the past, hope for the future
published: Wednesday | November 2, 2005
EULALEE THOMPSON
POSTERITY SHOULD be grateful to Rosa Henry, former inmate of Jamaica's old Lunatic Asylum (1830s), for documenting her experience there:
"When I got better, Dr. Scott said no one could leave without someone come for her ... There are many people in the mad house ... (who) died from ill treatment ... Steele ... is very cruel ... the blow he gave me with a stick ... broke my forehead ... Dr. Scott would see them beating us with sticks and would interfere."
Rosa's experience colours the socio-historical context of the book Images of Psychiatry: The Caribbean, being billed as the 'first-ever book on Caribbean psychiatry'.
A more extensive narration of Rosa's rather fetching experience in the 'mad house' was included in the Jamaica Journal (Vol. 22 No. 3, author Carol Mae Morrisey):'
TANKED
"I have been tanked. Mrs. Ryan (the matron) and three women lay hold of the person to be tanked, shove her into the water; as fast as she come above water, shove her in again and again until she is half-dead - and some do die little time after. When they tanked me, I swallow water till my belly swell. Every night they strip us naked, turn us into the cell, and lock us up until morning. The chinks (bugs) worry us ... Mrs. Ryan was very cruel. She and Steele used to beat us with stick; and she made us eat whatever she gave us, whether it was good or bad - sometimes half-raw."
That first lunatic asylum, as it was called then, was part of the Kingston Public Hospital, which was established in 1776. Professor Frederick Hickling, co-editor, and Dr. Roger Gibson indicates in chapter one, entitled 'The History of Caribbean Psychiatry', that a new and completely autonomous asylum was established in1862 after medical practitioners such as Lewis Bowerbank (himself of the planter class of that era) revealed the "maltreatment, exploitation and poor physical conditions" of the old asylum.
SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL JOURNEY
Chapter one sets the stage, for the other 14 chapters, of a social and historical journey into the world of mental illness, change in legislation, and shifts in treatment philosophy and protocol in mainly Jamaica and in some of the other islands in the Caribbean, mainly Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. The country's mental illness (or mental health) is viewed as a continuum, rooted in the slavery past, with psychosis, concepts of self-worth, self-efficacy and the general Caribbean psyche evolving through post-colonialism.
Professor Hickling explained recently at a Gleaner Editors' Forum that during slavery "mad" slaves were killed, but at the end of slavery, the attitude to mental illness had to change; mad people were put into dungeons, then to the Kingston Public Hospital and in 1862, everybody went to Bellevue Hospital.
"We have been moving since then on a historical process of change and transformation ... that includes now a paradigm shift to community mental health services," he said.
The book, published jointly by the University of the West Indies' Department of Community Health and Psychiatry (Mona) and the Section of Conflict Management and Resolution, of the World Psychiatric Association, was launched at the XIII Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in September.
Images of Psychiatry - The Caribbean was edited by Professor Frederick W. Hickling, head of the Section of Psychiatry at the UWI Mona, and Professor Eliot Sorel, Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University, Washington, U.S.A., Chairman of the Section of Conflict Management and Resolution of the World Psychiatric Association.
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