Mike Jay wrote this profile of Geel, a small town in Belgium whose residents have taken in people with who are disabled or who have mental illness....for more than 700 years. The townspeople call these people guests or boarders.
Thanks to Gabriella Grant for pointing out this incredible story, which was published by Aeon Magazine.
When the anti-psychiatry movement emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, many of its proponents — like the 19th-century moral and religious reformers before them — used the story of Geel to argue that psychiatry and its institutions should have no place in the treatment of the mentally unwell, and indeed that psychiatry created many of the problems it purported to solve. But there are many clear examples in its long history of medicine’s benefits: in eliminating the use of restraints and physical punishment, in stepping into chaotic situations where families are no longer able to cope, in medication regimes that have the power to transform lives of suffering. At the same time, Geel’s story does suggest that psychiatry’s role could be limited, perhaps dramatically so: not at the centre of mental healthcare but on its periphery, as a backstop to the community. In an ideal world, might not the modern psychiatric clinic shrink back towards the size of the 19th-century hospital: a discreet ‘inside’, as remote from the majority of patients’ lives as possible?
Yet this would demand a reform not simply of medicine but of society itself. It’s ironic but probably not coincidental that the need for a community response to mental illness is becoming obvious just as the structures that might provide it are failing.
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/the-town-where-the-mentally-ill-get-a-warm-welcome/
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