What gets called mental disorder or illness, mild or severe, shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships break down, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated. Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify our mental map of the world. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. We need an accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster and the way an unchanging outlook is maintained is by isolating oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong.



Sunday 18 April 2010

A national mental asylum?

 

Once in a while I find myself thinking that the experience of being transported at night by ambulance or police van, strapped or caged at a right angle to the direction of travel, becoming progressively disorientated as the streaking neon lights wipe short term memory, is not dissimilar to always being escorted whilst moving along the remorselessly straight corridors of the old Victorian asylums - and not necessarily because you were a threat to self or others - but because without help you would rapidly become lost.

For almost a decade now people have been saying that almost all confined young offenders have some form of mental disorder and/ or substance misuse problem. Amongst adults who are confined the official rate of ‘serious’ mental disorder is barely higher than amongst the general population - but that’s just a joke, nobody believes it. Much better to accept that a majority of the entire prison population now has a drug and/ or mental health problem - that prisons combined with special hospitals, regional secure units and other secure psychiatric wards - add-up to a new asylum system to replace the old. Given modern transportation and communications the corridors are now dual carriageways and motorways. Mental health law is as strong (and flexible) as it ever was. The impersonal bureaucratic rules and regulations remain. The NHS now runs prison medical services, so we can look forward to more and cleverer drugs!


During my career as a mental patient I spent time in two Victorian-style asylums, albeit towards the end their existence, I also had occasion to visit three others. Recently I was directed to a site with some photos of the first hospital in which I was a patient - Severalls in Colchester - I was amazed it hadn’t been redeveloped. The site is about 300-acres and held up to 2000 patients. Opened in 1913, it was based on the ‘echelon plan’, individual buildings but linked by interconnecting corridors to avoid the weather! Over the years the buildings have suffered vandalism and fire attacks but as the pictures here show you can still get a flavour of the environment. When I was there the staff were very proud of the murals, part of which are still visible. I was also told that one of the corridors was the longest of any asylum in the country - is that true?
Forensic unit 2017
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