Guest post by Sally Brewer, reprinted with permission from a private rant.
So, I was just reading an article about zoos. It was in the Guardian, it was a very interesting article and I quite enjoyed it. So when I got to the end I thought I’d read the comments left by readers.
The second comment contained this corker of a line:
“To see these types of animals in a zoo when you know them in the wild is like looking in the window of a ward for the mentally insane – they look like humans but much of their humanity is simply missing in some deeply sad way.”
I stopped. I read. I looked again. I read some more.
I had, in fact, read correctly. Apparently if you’re a human being suffering from some kind of mental illness which means you need to be in hospital for a while, ‘much of [your] humanity is simply missing’.
Now, I’ve been in a ward for the mentally insane. They aren’t called that these days, by the way. My ward was referred to as an ‘acute psychiatric ward’. Some of the patients staying there were pretty obviously unwell and walked about in hospital issue gowns saying strange things. Some of them didn’t. One girl got up every morning and put on a different pretty dress (the first day I met her she had a petticoat on underneath a proper 1950s big dress). She used to practice her French with me at breakfast. One woman was too unwell to get out of bed and just stayed there all day, but used to talk to the psychiatrist about her husband and children who she missed.
None of us were lacking humanity.
While I was on the psych ward I wrote poetry (not very good, but no one said talent was a requirement for humanity), I wrote letters and G+ posts and worked hard on making my friends and family laugh so they didn’t worry about me too much. I turned up my nose at the hospital food, and I craved chocolate. I spoke to my much loved boyfriend last thing before I went to bed every night and I looked forwards to a trip we had planned to Alton Towers when I got out. I didn’t stop being human. Not even a little bit.
Sometimes I was unwell, although I was generally one of the best behaved of patients. I am, it appears, a naturally obliging soul most of the time, and the nurses normally seemed to want reasonable things for me, so I tended to turn up to take my pills when told and tried to not get in trouble. But even if I hadn’t; even if I had screamed, or ranted, or run naked down the corridor (no one did that although one woman did walk around wearing nothing but a very colourful pair of pants) I would still have been entirely, completely and comprehensively human.
Being mentally unwell isn’t lacking ‘much of [your] humanity’, any more than you lack humanity if you can’t walk or if you need injections of insulin or if you have a temperature of 104 and can’t get out of bed for a week. Actually, I’ve had that last one happen to me and I felt a lot further from humanity than I ever did when I was on the psych ward. And it depresses me that someone can make that analogy, perfectly casually, in the middle of a conversation about something completely different as if it’s just accepted that people who are on a psych ward (or a ward for the mentally insane, if you want) are less than human and everyone will understand the analogy.
Gah.
