Ilkley Litfest: Mike Jay
The first event I went to at this year's Ilkley Literature Festival was an eye-opening talk on the history of asylums. Straight away, in my first sentence, I've struggled with what to call them, and that difficulty in terminology was the first thing Mike Jay addressed.
His book is called This Way Madness Lies, and he stressed that none of his word choice is intended to be offensive but when you're covering hundreds of years of history the words people use change as much as the attitudes. Madness, lunacy, insanity, mental illness. The affliction as permanent and inherent, or able to be treated with rest, electric shocks, drugs. The asylum as prison, hospital, home. All these changes in perspective reflect changes in society or the progress of medicine.
It is not a linear, progressive history and Jay suggested there were cyclical elements and also - which I found particularly thought-provoking - that if you took a snapshot at any one time you would find examples of both good and bad conditions. He also talked about delving into several hundred years worth of the Bethlem hospital ('bedlam') archives over the last decade, and gave a very brief overview of the 'open air asylum' at Geel in Belgium, which I hadn't heard of but has about as long a pedigree as Bethlem (Geel is a town in which there is a centuries-old tradition of taking people with mental problems as boarders with families).
All in all, a packed 45 minutes where Mike Jay rattled through a number of topics from his (illustrated) book and showed a selection of slides including art by asylum inmates, some or all of which were taken from the book. As the audience questions about the effects of austerity on mental healthcare today, and the possible future for psychiatric treatment, showed this history illuminates the present and I've added this hefty volume to my To Read list.