The way Western medicine has handled mentally ill people over the past centuries has been to outcast them and tie them down both physically and mentally. A few months ago I posted an old interview with journalist Robert Whitaker discussing the harm most “treatment” does to mentally ill patients in the Western system. I emphasize “Western” so much because different societies and cultures around the world have had different ways of handling mental illness. For example, in some First Nations societies, mental illness is not seen as something that necessarily has to be “fixed” in a person; it is rather seen as a part of who they are, accepted for what it is, and that person continues to be a part of the society despite their “abnormal” behavior as long as that behavior is not destructive to said society (ref). One can argue that being rejected by one’s family and society could exacerbate any paranoia or depression one has, and that the traditional tribal methods of treatment, where the entire group or society rallies around the individual and performs ceremonies that leave them feeling a part of a whole, could help to heal a troubled mind. But I digress…back to how us Westerners do it! While today we do it by using drugs to trap people in their own minds, for decades past we did it with asylums, shutting our mad mothers, brothers, sisters and fathers away to be isolated and tortured, studied and experimented on. Photographer Romina Margherita A Diaz has compiled a series of stunning and bleak photographs of abandoned Tuscan asylums, and each dark image speaks to the chaos and horror that still clings to the cold walls of these ruins. Looking at these photos, I have to ask myself – who was more disturbed? The patients who were force-fed, tied up in straightjackets and electrocuted, or their “caretakers”?
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