Escape dark clutches of the past
We have rightly elevated mental illness and mental wellbeing to mainstream discourse, but in many ways society has not come far,
MADNESS frightens us. We lock up those we consider to be dangerous, florid or irrational in their social interactions. We separate the mentally ill from the community via the mechanisms of restricting movements, placement in a psychiatric ward, or more commonplace in this so called civilised century, by warehousing in a prison. And in European Australia it has ever been the case since the English ruling class hit upon the idea of the mass export of the under classes to Botany Bay.
Today, the Victorian Government has embarked upon a royal commission into mental health care, or lack thereof, and there is a constant squabble between health professionals, lawyers and community advocates on the one hand for a more enlightened approach, and on the other hand the political class which generally, subliminally at least, views mental illness as a community protection issue.
We have not come far as a society when it comes to dealing with madness. James Dunk’s recently published extraordinary work Bedlam at Botany Bay (New South Publishing 2019) recounts in poignant detail that the foundations for dealing with madness were set then, some 200 and more years ago. They are however as entrenched today, despite the veneer of progress.
Dunk, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, presents a history which is far from the triumphalist white-washing histories favoured by former Liberal prime minister John Howard and his friends at the Ramsay Centre, a newly created supposed academic vehicle for Mr Howard to pursue his ‘western civilisation is best’ thesis.
What Dunk reveals is the reality of what happens when you create a prison in inhospitable country, and where the addiction to petty rules means that resort by the political class to using the
black letter of the law as a panacea for any social conundrum became the order of the day.
While Dunk’s history is not an empirical measurement of diagnoses, numbers and treatments, it does tell us that in NSW and early Van Diemens Land the “divergence between internal and external realties, which produces visible, audible friction” as Dunk defines madness, was disruptive. The way madness was dealt with by government and society was a means of containing that disruption. Containment was fundamental to the order of the convict-jailer world of early European Australia.
Dunk’s telling of the stories of individuals who were perceived to be mad and how the oppressive colonial structures dealt with it leads to this conclusion.
Mental illness undermined the “grand experiment of shipping thousands of criminals across the sea” because “in a society built around discipline, magistrates, officers, judges and governors charged with establishing order ” madness was “not an illness” but instead “perilous chaos”.
What has changed? We pat ourselves on the backs because we recognise that mental illness is what it means. But on the other hand our legislators and courts seek to curtail the extent to which it can be said that mental illness at the time a person offends or when they are sentenced means that detention should not be used to warehouse that person. This is because the fear of “perilous chaos” still emerging haunts us.
And just as the extreme punishment of transportation, coupled with the sheer hostility of the land to which one was transported, was enough to induce or perpetuate poor mental health, so today the over-worked court system and overcrowded prisons make for similar conditions.
Those who suffer acute mental health episodes lose their station in society. They are at the whim of a medical and legal apparatus that determines when they are ‘well enough’ to have the shackles removed. Once again, as was the case in early European Australia, this is a regime which is inherently unequal in terms of knowledge and the capacity to exercise power serves to control.
In the forensic mental health setting, the treatment of individuals found not guilty by reason of insanity or those who are convicted but who suffer such acute episodes of mental illness, the predominant ethos is one of control and removal from society. This is again akin to the ethos of 200 years ago.
Perhaps we ought not be surprised that the architecture for dealing with ‘madness’ in early European Australia is maintained in some form today. The European Enlightenment was then, and remains today, the intellectual and political underpinning for dealing with madness. That is, a belief in paternalism guidance, a willingness to experiment on vulnerable human beings, and the use of institutions to treat within a scientifically informed framework.
We have rightly elevated mental illness and mental wellbeing to mainstream discourse in this country but James Dunk’s expose of what madness meant in the context of European colonisation of this continent is telling. In so many ways that experience is ingrained in our psyche today.
They are at the whim of a medical and legal apparatus that determines when they are ‘well enough’ to have the shackles removed