Get Thee to a Nunnery

 

Greg Gutfield and the crew attempt to tackle a growing current problem: what to do about the homeless?

The same issue arises in my current classes on “The Glass Menagerie.” Laura, in that play, is the type: the type who end up homeless. Surely this is her likely fate, once her mother dies. 

How then could she escape her glass menagerie?

Psilocybin is snake oil. I think Gutfield comes closest to the solution when he says, get them out of the cities. Get them out of their current situation, which, as with Laura, is driving them mad. Madness is situational. It is a rational response to an impossible situation.

This would not be a matter of involuntary confinement, a violation of their human rights. You might say, and it would be true, that some people living in tents do not want a proper apartment. Offered shelter, they refuse to move. 

That is because they fear being trapped by “the system.” They want to opt out.

In other words, get them out into the countryside. These tent people are doing their best to simulate that in the city. Give them a bus ticket, and a permanent room in a motel at the edge of some small town, and leave them alone, and they will be delighted.

Consider Tom, in the play. He understands the imperative need to get away—he imagines joining the merchant marine.

Laura, by contrast, seeks to escape into her imagination, with her “glass menagerie.” This is the path to “psychosis”; to imaginary things becoming real. An opting out of the world as a whole.

The immediate need is more specific: generally to escape from a manipulative and narcissistic parent, who views their children as extensions of themself. This, however, develops into a mortal fear of “the system,” as with Tom, or, in Laura’s case, a mortal fear of life in general.

The need is to “get away from it all.”

We used to know this; and we used to have many fewer mentally ill. The original asylums, built at the beginning of the 19th century, were intended to be in tranquil rural settings where the agitated could simply have a restorative rest. In other words, true “asylums.” The New Brunswick Asylum, put up on the 1830s near where I write, was a prime example. It was on a piece of high ground outside the city, within soothing earshot and sight of the scenic Reversing Falls. It had an attached farm which the inmates worked; others did handicrafts. The spot is now a park. In Kingston, the asylum was built along the waterfront, again away from the city. The site is now, again, a park.

These original asylums had a cure rate of something like 80 to 90 percent within a year. Yet they devolved into the supposed “snake pits” that we closed down in the 1960s, in favour of throwing all our Lauras out in the street to freeze or starve.

What happened?

In the mid eighteen hundreds, “scientific” psychiatry began to emerge and to take over the asylums, turning them into “mental hospitals.” Rather than being left alone to sort out their troubles, the inmates of these institutions began to be poked and prodded and ordered about, experimented on and, in effect, tortured, in accordance with the latest “scientific” methods. We got the horrors of hydrotherapy, lobotomy, straightjackets, shock treatments, and the rest. The patients were subjected to the very same sort of bullying, objectification, and manipulation that had driven them mad in the first place. Mental illness became, for the first time in history, incurable. 

Because people stopped getting well, these “hospitals” grew overcrowded, and conditions further deteriorated. As the cities spread to surround and enclose them.

Granted, simply getting people homes out in the countryside is not necessarily going to be enough. This is only removing them from the source of the problem. They will be left with trauma. 

But why did we need to build these large asylums in the 19th century in the first place? What happened to the mentally ill before then?

Before then, we had monasteries and convents in the countryside. A child from an abusive family, or a child rejected by their family, could go there.

Picture Laura again: isn’t this the one plausible happy ending for her? To become a Carmelite nun?

A monastery can replace the faulty programming by a narcissistic milieu with new programming, true programming.

And the postulants are otherwise left alone to sort things out.