Posted by Joe on: 10.01.2007 /
Last week, a couple of middle aged men went to a care home to meet an 85 year old lady called Jean Gambell. Soon afterwards she had a slight stroke, which it was thought may have been brought on by the reunion.
It is hardly surprising. Jean Gambell was meeting her brothers for the first time in 70 - yes that is not a typo, that is SEVENTY - years. As a teenager of 15, Jean had been incarcerated due to mental illness, as a result of her stealing a few small coins. The brothers allege that the coins were found later.
She was then in the system for an entire lifetime, losing contact with her family and by any reakoning completely wasting her life. Enough one would think, to send anyone over the edge of mental instability even if they were sane to start with. Yet the brothers found a frail old lady, who could identify them by name and showed remarkably little bitterness for her lot in life. More here.
Other than being entirely flabbergasted by the whole sorry tale, I would like to know:
Surely we should all be thoroughly ashamed that we live in a world where this could happen.
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Comment by: Helen
1 10/1/07 10:41 AM | Comment Link |Wow, that’s so sad :(
I’d like to think we wouldn’t do that any more. One of her brothers seems to think so:
I see that she was working in a doctor’s surgery when she was accused of stealing money and put away. It sounds like the mean vindictive act of a doctor that did it. He had way too much power; and it’s tragic that this injustice never came to light until now.
As you said, how many other people might have suffered this? Even if we don’t do it now, we evidently did do it at one point and I doubt this poor lady is the only one it happened to.
What is still true today is that you can lose rights through being diagnosed mentally ill. You are still somewhat at the mercy of medical professionals if that happens. :(
Comment by: joe
2 10/1/07 11:02 AM | Comment Link |Yep, you are absolutely right Helen.
It is quite the most revolting and perverted example of institutionalism that I have ever heard. I still can’t get my head around the fact that they ‘lost’ the lady’s papers. It is like something from 1984.
Comment by: Helen
3 10/1/07 1:42 PM | Comment Link |It’s also tragic that evidently she wasn’t from a family who had the understanding and means and desire to rescue her and keep her in touch with her brothers. It sounds like it was not a happy family situation. The institutional incompetence, doctor’s unkindness and family lack of support all came together in a very unfortunate way in this situation.
Comment by: benjamin ady
4 10/1/07 4:35 PM | Comment Link |Joe,
I’m thinking the answers to your question about whether other people have been involuntarily detained for long periods of time is clearly yes. I mean even if we live the insanity thing alone, how many people have, for instance, been given life sentences or even condemned to death (in the good ol’ American/medieval way of doing things) and later exonerated through various things, including, lately, DNA evidence? Let alone the millions of refugeese around the world, many of whom have been in camps for generations! Definitely in many cases a sort of involuntary confinement.
I think the thing that it says about a society–especially our society, is that this is yet more evidence of our increasing disjointedness/discommunity. It’s the price we pay for increased personal power/autonomy. It’s enormously sad both in general, and as you point out with this particular story, in each specific case.
You are right about how we don’t listen to people once they’ve been labelled and sorted into our preconceived sets. Children are better at not doing this, methinks. I’ve been pondering this in my human performance lab this quarter. Are you familiar with the stroop effect? It’s fascinating that once we learn to read, processing words becomes more automatic than processing colors. The thing about that is that at one level, colors are more *real* than words. I mean the *word* “red” is just an arbitrary symbol that *refers* to the actual very vivid reality of red. But once we do words, it becomes so automatic to use these symbols that at one level we lose some of the reality to which they refer–thus you can see “red” and read out loud “red” without necessarily ever referring to the mental image of the actual vivid color. In the same way, we do this to people. We build a mental representation of them, and then when we see them, we just refer to our mental representation, and thus don’t refer to, or don’t refer to as strongly, the actuality–the living person in front of us. And this is automatic. The case you raise is a shocking example of this, but it seems to me we do it to each other in smaller and yet still belittling ways every day.
hope that makes some sense.
Comment by: Rachel
5 10/1/07 4:57 PM | Comment Link |Wow. That is just awful, Joe! It sounds like something straight out of a Dickens novel.
Comment by: April Terry
6 10/2/07 12:00 PM | Comment Link |I recently read a story about a man who was reunited with his sister who had been institutionalized because she was developmentally disabled and the family had her put in the institution.
It’s heartbreaking and tragic. Even if it happens to one person, it’s like putting an innocent person in prison.
Comment by: joe
7 10/2/07 4:23 PM | Comment Link |B said above:
Increasing? I don’t actually believe that we are getting more disjointed, if anything quite the reverse. Disfunctional perhaps, but not disjointed.
I think this is just another example of institutional inertia. The question is how you get systems to consider people as, y’know, important rather than boxes on forms.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
8 10/3/07 6:46 PM | Comment Link |Joe,
interesting. I was kind of thinking of discommunity as *being* disjointed. Jean Vanier touches on this in “Community and Growth”, which is fairly devastating. He’s talking about how people used to live in fairly homogenous groups, but society worldwide has grown increasingly urbanized and increasinlgy mobile, and we have sacrificed community
He kind of talks about how personal freedom/mobility and community are mutually exclusive concepts. We have relatively enormously high levels of the former, and increasingly tiny levels of the latter.
So I guess I mean that if you think of community using Paul’s analogy, the human body–then it seems to me that we no longer (if we ever did) function well together as a society. Yes, we have all the technology, the mass media, etc. etc. but in terms of people being connected with other people, it’s not there. It would be relatively simple for me, for instance, to divorce my wife, leave my children, and more or less diappear from the lives of everyone who has ever known me. Life would go on, pretty much. I mean at one level that would be horrible, but the thing is this is where unbearably large numbers of people actually live. we are *meant* to be plugged in to a body/community, with the relative loss of personal freedom/autonomy that implies. But we mostly *aren’t*. Like a human body where the, for instance, right forearm has been removed at the elbow–has been *disjointed*. It doesn’t function super well anymore. Which is exactly what happened to the lady in the story you posted on. But the body should *notice* such a thing. and we don’t. I mean somehow we’ve gotten used to increasingly high levels of this disjointedness, perhpas little by little, like boiling a frog.
thoughts?
Comment by: joe
9 10/4/07 2:43 AM | Comment Link |I totally respect Jean Vanier, so I don’t want to sound like I’m disagreeing with him.
And I’m not really suggesting that our communities are not disjointed. I guess I have a mental burp every time someone claims that in some way our current society is ‘worse than it used to be’. I’m sick of hearing this kind of BS in church.
Society is just different than it used to be. We used to burn witches at the stake, hold public executions and employ people to live and work in the sewers. In some ways it is less connected, but I’m not sure I want to live in a society where people lynch people in mobs or whatever. That might have been a connected society in a sense, but clearly not one I’d want to live in.
Yes, we’re messed up and our societies are broken. But there is no point in comparing ourselves with past communities, because that was then and this is now.
Comment by: benjamin ady
10 10/4/07 11:10 AM | Comment Link |Joe,
You make a totally valid point. There are both assets and liabilities in any society/culture/community/time. You’re absolutely right about “the good old days” mentality. Thanks for catching me on that.
On the other hand, at some levels I find it somewhat interesting to attempt to compare past/other cultures/communities with my/our own current culture/community. Maybe we can learn lessons from what they are doing/have done, both right and wrong?
It seems possible to me that ‘the banality of evil’, which has come up in this thread, was somehow a lot less the case in the past. It seems possible to me that back when the world was less connected–i.e. much larger–it was a lot harder to avoid the reality of evil, or perhaps harder to separate out global/national evil from one’s daily life. I guess what I’m saying is it seems that now, with the technology and information at our disposal, we are *more* responsible for the larger evil in the world than they were back then. Or something like that. Hope I’m making some sort of sense.
Really enjoying dialoguing with you. You make me ponder.
Comment by: joe
11 10/4/07 12:21 PM | Comment Link |So what you’re saying is that we’re more connected in a not-truely-connected kind of a way. Well, yeah, I guess I can go with that.
I’m not sure about the banality of evil, surely there is going to be a lot you don’t know about or want to know about. Given that so many people died in the crusades, for example, there must have been some knowledge back home of what was going on. Yet for many years people didn’t want to deal with those massacres and continued going on ever more pointless attempts to attack Jerusalem.
Comment by: Rachel
12 10/4/07 2:09 PM | Comment Link |I completely agree, Benjamin. And we live a a country with both a personal gratification oriented consumer culture and a radically individualized “personal Savior” version of Christianity. This combination powerfully reinforces a sense of absolute autonomy and entitlement. That viewpoint was summed up well in the Ronald Reagan quote you recently posted.
Comment by: Justice and Compassion
13 10/4/07 2:22 PM | Comment Link |[...] the Criminal Insanity thread, Joe posted this comment: I guess I have a mental burp every time someone claims that in some way our [...]