Particularly in the arena of mental health, distortion of history results in loss of choice.
Some of you may already have heard about my new book, Sane Asylums, The Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind. Thanks for spreading the word!
Simon & Schuster
Also available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Bam!., Bookshop, Indie Bound, and Homeopathic Educational Services
It’s been gratifying to hear of so many stories about homeopathy’s helping when conventional medicine has failed or caused harm. Still, as a mental health care option, a megaphone loud enough to lead Americans to homeopathy has not yet been found. We also lament the ready accessibility of assault weapons while failing to block their sale. Both problems cry out for new thinking.
Some guilt-ridden psychiatrists purport to distance themselves from the baloney science the PR arm of their own psychopharm industry blurts. Sadly, unfounded media claims about a “broken” brain or chemical imbalance are too often heard to be questioned. Unable to wean themselves from their accustomed profits the same doctors cannot constrain themselves from toxic neuroleptic and benzodiazepine prescribing. That this is disastrous for the public has not gone unnoticed as the popularity of Robert Whitaker’s books Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic attest.
While it amazes me how little pushback I have gotten on Sane Asylums’ subtitle that psychiatry has lost its mind (none actually) a mystery remains why so few of us in the end opt for homeopathy rather than psychopharm for anxiety, depression, mood or eating disorders.
The philosopher John Locke has said: “New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any reason but because they are not already common.” Though good sense shouts that homeopathy is the mental health care antidote to toxic psychopharmacology the notion as yet appears too “new.” After all this time, how come? The reason is that in the wake of homeopathic history’s hijacking, freedom of health care choice has eroded.
Sane Asylums was originally pitched to Springer, an overseas publishing house with a long history of bringing forth homeopathic medical and historical texts. In the wake of a European kibosh on homeopathy something changed. A trumped up reason was found to reject the proposal: With a straight face Springer let me know that homeopathic asylums and their neighboring, non-homeopathic mental hospitals offered perfectly equivalent moral care. The differences were not worth mentioning.
If you lived in upstate New York in the 1880s and had a nervous breakdown, your family might have had to choose between sending you to Selden Talcott’s Middletown Asylum for the Insane in Middletown, NY or the Utica mental illness hospital, “Old Main,” run by Amariah Brigham and 120 miles north of Middletown. Both facilities offered rest, nursing and cultural activities. The benefits included homeopathy and spectatorship of a superb baseball the team, the Asylums at Middletown; and at Utica, the opportunity to contribute to the asylum’s newsletter.
A renowned “sane” asylum in Easton, PA., Dr. James Pursell’s sanitarium,
a remodeled 44 room mansion originally built in 1812
An appreciable difference was that if you were prone to violent outbursts, so as to protect yourself and fellow patients at Middletown, the last resort–mode of restraint–would have been in a camisole (straight jacket). But at Utica, Amariah Brigham would have penned you up in his infamous “Utica Crib,” a torture device Edgar Allen Poe can have imagined. With a thick mattress on the bottom, slats on the sides, and a hinged top that could be locked from the outside, the crib was eighteen inches deep, eight feet long, and three feet wide. Used to restrain and break the spirit of patients, the notorious crib I suspect is the backstory for the expression to “become unhinged,” referring to the wild behaviors of patients once the crib’s cover was lifted. Knowing the facts which asylum would you pick?
Forty-three miles away from Middletown stood an equally large, non-homeopathic moral care mental health asylum, the Hudson River State Hospital. It was built in 1873, one year before Middletown. In contrast to Middletown Hospital where Selden Talcott’s facility was not only homeopathic but entirely self-sufficient, Hudson River State Hospital was a money pit excoriated by the New York Times for having through mismanagement or embezzlement lost $1.2 million dollars of tax payers’ monies.
In another example, let us consider Mary Todd Lincoln’s insanity and treatment at Richard Patterson’s “sane” asylum. Existing history offers two equally preposterous accounts. The first is that following a sensational trial, Mary, who the court deemed incurably insane, was never really ill in the first place. This is belied by accounts such as the following (documented in Sane Asylums):
One of Mary’s doctors, Willis Danforth, was the star witness. He reported that Mary had told him that an evil Indian spirit was pulling wires out of her left eye, that she was distracted by premonitions of her own death and that she was prone to vomiting up her meals to foil imaginary poisoners. The manager of the Chicago hotel she lived in explained how Mary had shown up in the elevator half-naked, and sent all her belongings to Milwaukee one day believing the city was being consumed by a raging fire.
The second narrative says that while clearly out of her mind, all Mary Todd Lincoln needed in order to recover was a spot of rest and the advice of savvy lawyers. Up until my 150 year-late investigation homeopathy’s role in bringing Mary Todd Lincoln to sanity has gone untold. My conjecture is that had Mary’s successful treatment been lauded and recounted in school books, setbacks sustained by homeopathic medical schools in the wake of the 1910 Flexner report could have been forestalled.
The great utopian asylums were undone by their own success that led to overcrowding, underfunding and inferior staffing. In the bigger picture homeopathy’s demise occurred insidiously, driven by immense pressure exerted by the impetus of biomedical capital driven forces that caught up society and seduced homeopaths as well. As recounted in Sane Asylums homeopathy’s marginalization is attributed to economic pressures rather than to biomedical advances.
Entrenched within academia is a narrative that the true story inconveniently contradicts. For this we can thank Johns Hopkins Medical School whose publications persistently portray homeopathy as passe due to its having been a sect and a medical heresy. Johns Hopkins’ fictitious account contaminates medical school departments of history and university history departments throughout the country.
Having surveyed the faculties of dozens of university history departments it is hard to miss a curricular concentration top heavy on gender, colonialism, racism and Black History. The ubiquity of these topics is in many ways commendable, but there is a dark side: Other worthwhile fields whose exploration could likewise expand informed choice and enhance well-being are neglected. Academics, historians, translational medicine proponents and social science professors attending to homeopathic history have gone missing.
Confronted with a narrative invented by the pharmaceutical industry it is no wonder the public is easily deceived and devoid of informed health care choice. Researching the buried history of our amazing homeopathic asylums, a task that Sane Asylums likens to excavating the Dead Sea Scrolls should belong to professional historians not a lone homeopath. Seizing our narrative will elevate homeopathy’s mental health care profile.
In preparation for and after the recent release of Sane Asylums, Jerry did numerous podcasts. Two of them are below:
- Click Here to listen to Richard Syrett’s Strange Planet on Spotify
- Click Here to listen to Les Jensen’s BlogTalk
Sane Asylums can be purchased at the following links below:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books a Million
Bookshop.org
Indi Bound
Homeopathic Education Services