Suitcases Exhibit and Books at 12:10

Yesterday, Thursday, before a visit to Special Collections I saw the Suitcases Exhibit at the Undergraduate Library.

Books at 12:10 will discuss Tinkers by Paul Harding on Tuesday. A turning point in the story happens because a 1920's brochure for a Maine State Mental Institution appears on a bureau. Because of concerns for children in a family, a medical practitioner has informed a wife about the Mental Institution. A character, who has epileptic seizures, intuits that his wife plans to place him in an institution, so he takes his tinker's cart past their house, takes the road south and does not return.

One aspect of psychiatric care importantly involves the fact that diagnosis and commitment often has had something to do with the safety or convenience of others. In The Medicalization of Everyday Life, Thomas Szasz quotes Karl Wernicke (1848-1905), German Neuropathologist - "The medical treatment of patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom..."

The theme of the Suitcases exhibit is the infringement of personal freedoms of individual people committed to a state hospital in New York. To me it seemed very moving. It was easy to look at the exhibit because pertinant details - length of stay and date of commitment, along with dates of birth and death - were placed in a consistent format with portraits, one could compare the stories, each on its own large presentation board.

I wish to link to an article which appeared in yesterday's University of Washington Daily about the exhibit, Unspeakable Discourse: A Series of Lectures and Films Examines Flaws in Mental-Health System, by Hayat Norime.

In our human experience we do not doubt that mental illness and mental health exist. It is definitely possible for individuals to be in a percieved world that bears little resemblance to the perceptions of people around them. Definitions and ways of evaluating this fact have changed. When I reached Tacoma later in the afternoon and was at the branch library, I found a January 2011 Wired magazine with an article about changes over the years in mental health evaluation.