Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics[1] left a strong impression on me when I first read it in 1980, the year that I returned for a few months to the grey, climatic shock; dirty streets; wounded, intricate social relationships; and haunting beauty that makes up so much of contemporary Ireland’s transient passage, both rural and urban. It rained a great deal that year; I stayed in O'Shea's cottage between Bleisce and Carnahalla and felt very much alone as I walked along small roads, by rivers, across wet fields, and over green hills, searching, seeking to reach through my own shaded memories a place that was alight and immemorial. It was, in retrospect, a beneficial time.
Recently I heard that the “the books author Nancy Scheiper Hughes is as passionate as ever about 'peace time crimes', especially to those with mental issues.” It’s an odd phrase but touches on something that for me, at least, may be a little more real: How can a de-communalized society that has become fundamentally unbalanced treat anyone who is suffering from such illness?
When I experienced a breakdown (so called) while living in Australia, I experienced a fervid apprehension that allopathic doctors would reach me first; there was a deeply felt dread about that. I innately knew–given the level of understanding of many of them–what they would do and sensed quite clearly if one drug, sedative or otherwise, was placed in my body, a necessary process which had commenced would be damaged. I could be left stranded, maybe truly deranged, for as I have written elsewhere, the life that I was being called to live was no longer compatible with the life that I was living. In such a situation, one may wish to have the support of a mature Jung, Laing, Reich, or one such as Podvoll who would hold you in their arms and “stand at the door of whatever feeling, dread, or emotion it is and listen or just be... and pay active attention,”[2] but alas it is not always so.
In some ways the treatment of what we term mental illness is as askew today as it was when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was made. The movie is near enough in its portrayal and not just in the fact that it was filmed in a 'mental' hospital with some of the actors struggling with their own shrunken views about sanity. I heard Thomas Szasz[3] once respond to a group of psychiatrists who were hostile to his views, "I know about you–when someone talks to God, you call it prayer, but if God talks back, you call it madness". I have since learnt (and not from a book), no illness can be truly, comprehensively treated without an opening to the sacred. Institutional allopathic medicine has for the most part lost sight of the Healer, is fearful of death (seen as something to be conquered, thus such language as the war against cancer), and unfortunately but understandably, given modern economics, locked inside the profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies.
I slept in a borrowed car some stormy nights in the little village of An Clochán, out towards the western edge of the Dingle Peninsula on which the anthropological fieldwork for Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics is based. Some of the locals felt hurt, their trust betrayed by its publication. Maybe the author could have been more sensitive, but that would have required a much deeper practical knowledge than she had at the time.
The book itself I have recommended over the years, for I found it an accurate recording of mental illness in rural Ireland. Indeed, it is now relevant in just about any part of the world where members of old, broken societies callus themselves in fearful, life debasing abuse of alcohol or its equivalent, and many hang gutted in the oft-times feverish existence called schizophrenia.
[1] Nancy Scheper Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics
Mental illness in Rural Ireland. University of California Press
An excellent review of this book was done by Gina Zavota
(Department of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook) in 2002
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Saints-Scholars-Schizophrenics-Twentieth-Anniversary/dp/0520224809
[2] Edward Podvoll
[3] Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920 – 2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
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