Who Decides Women Are Mad?
Trigger warning: domestic violence
Recently I have been writing about women incarcerated in British mental asylums in the 1950s. The essence of the story centres around my grandmother, who also found herself there and, as well as exploring the stories of other women, I wanted to find out why and how she ended up as an inmate.
I know a little of her home life at that time and it wasn’t pretty. She lived with an abusive man and she couldn’t cope, which is presumably why she attempted to take her own life – the event that landed her in a psychiatric hospital.
She was then deemed mad – by both the patriarchal institution that ‘treated’ her with electric shock therapy and the rest of the family – and she lived forever with that label. Whereas the man she was returned home to lived until his 80s with no such label, his reputation intact, his mind untroubled.
But this was in the 1950s, things are so different now.
Except they aren’t.
In the UK yesterday, a man was found not guilty of the unlaw…