SANE ASYLUMS

If you are at all interested in mental illness and psychiatry (and who of us in the Scientific and Medical Network are not?), you will want to read this book and re-visit a sadly lost chapter in the history of psychiatric medicine. Who among us knew that there was a time in US medical history when homeopathy was the preferred treatment for mental illness? Not only did it not have the tragic side effects that conventional psychiatric drugs produce, but it had a gentle and consistent success rate of actually treating and curing people.

The author is a faculty member of the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine based in Massachusetts who has done us all a great favour by researching the incredible lost history of homeopathy in the USA. He has discovered that in the late 1800s and early 1900s homeopathy was popular all over the USA with more than a 100 fully functioning homeopathic hospitals and more than 1000 homeopathic pharmacies flourishing. There were also 22 homeopathic medical schools; yet all this history has been virtually wiped out of the collective memory due to the politicisation of medicine and the arrogance of the material-medical school who imposed a particular paradigm of scientific allopathy on the American medical profession.

The giants of the pharmaceutical industry, as it was then developing, seized control of the legislative process through Congress and essentially created a false orthodoxy in which the only possible paradigm for healing people was to become the scientific straightjacket of today. For those of us in the Scientific and Medical Network who are looking critically at the origins of this state of affairs, it might well be useful to re-visit the way that homeopathy was once so popular in the US and other parts of the world. We might then study the lessons of therapeutic impoverishment caused by the narrowing of the parameters of our medical paradigms. We might learn to our surprise that all that is modern is not necessarily better. This book is not a historical treatise and at times it is maddeningly difficult to navigate. It is more a tract by an enthusiast who wants us to discover a long-lost wisdom that we do not yet even know that we have lost.

We learn many things from this book such as how popular homeopathy was in the 19th century in the USA with its advocates including Dr. William James, the philosopher and physiologist and author of the seminal Varieties of Religious Experience, Longfellow, the poet, Hawthorne, the essayist, Harriet Beeches Stowe, Louis May Alcott and President Abraham Lincoln among many others. Lincoln's respect for homoeopathy is an under-researched fact of his own intellectual universe. And his wife, Mary Lincoln was treated for her own mental illness which occurred from time to time, with homeopathy. In 1875, she was admitted to Belview Hospital which was one of the most important of the homeopathic asylums treating mental patients at the time. She was released from the hospital later that year into the custody of her sister and the next year was officially declared sane by the Chicago District Court.

Her husband, of course, had been tragically assassinated some years previously and no doubt this had contributed to her own unfortunate mental state. We may ask: how does homeopathy treat mental illness? Like all homeopathic remedies it takes minute doses of pathological substances which would otherwise cause delusions and hallucinations, if a person consumed them at normal dosage. But by reducing the size of the dose to minute traces, these homeopathic remedies seem to kick start a natural contra-reaction by the patient's mind-body system. It is as if by giving the patients mind-body a tiny dose of madness, it decides actually I don't want that and somehow creates antibodies that can then restore the patient to general health. I can speak from personal experience that this actually works since having prescribed a homeopathic remedy based on snake poison, I watched as the patient recovered visibly for the better within a couple of weeks.

Most contemporary practitioners of the psychiatric profession in Britain and the English-speaking worlds have now realised that we have reached a bit of a dead-end in what is on offer through conventional psychiatry. Patients are rendered docile and compliant and their symptoms can be greatly lessened if the correct psychiatric allopathic remedies are administered, but everyone agrees they before long that may have to prescribe large numbers, perhaps up to 4 or 5 additional medicines per day, to treat a complex psychiatric condition and then on top of that to prescribe another 4 or 5 medicines to address their side-effects and so on and on.

This has led one group of psychologists to frame an entirely new way of dealing with psychiatric breakdown which is to examine the familial, social and personal worlds of the patient who is suffering. They call this the Power Threat Meaning Paradigm, which was developed by a team led by Dr. Lucy Johnstone and published in 2018 by the British Psychological Society (BPS). Through rigorous research they have discovered that psychiatric breakdown normally occurs when there is an imbalance of power that is built up over time in the patient's circumstances. Extreme cases are abuse, including sexual abuse. At this point the patient feels under threat and it might lead to hallucinatory delusions occurring which however also have some grounding in fact,

Recently, a talk was given summarising this paradigm which ends with a poem dedicated to a psychiatric patient who was treated to literally dozens of psychiatric medicines none of which cured her. It can be seen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6VHV0kUn2E&t=2s Perhaps it is time to re-visit homeopathy again and I would urge therefore anyone interested in psychiatry to read this book.

But what is homeopathy? How does it work? Hasn't it all been disproved one might ask? Those readers of this Journal who can read French, might want to study the work L'Homéopathie by Marc Henry (Les Éditions Natur'Eau Quant 2019). This marvellous little book gives a brilliant overview of the history of homeopathy starting with the life story of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) beginning with his scientific studies into the nature of illness and his training as a medical chemist. Over many decades of trial and error, travelling about his native Germany he discovered the law of similitudes whereby a small dose of a poison can actually cure the exact symptoms which it would cause in the wrong dose.

He came upon this law, as the book explains, between 1790-1794 and summed it up in the Latin phrase Similia Similibus Curantur. Based around Leipzig and then Hamburg and Brunswick, he successfully treated a number of influential patients which made him a celebrity to those in the know. He also had success in treating patients with severe mental illness who had been abandoned by traditional psychiatric doctors. Before long, his help was being sought by all classes of people including the aristocracy of France, Naples, Austria, Spain and Germany. A British Homeopathic Society was created in 1843 by one of his students and The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital was founded in 1849. The British Royal family took to homeopathy as a lifesaver and right up until modern time Queen Elizabeth II and her son King Charles III have been devoted users of homeopathic remedies as a first choice wherever possible. Hahnemann ended up living in Paris from 1835-1843 where his practice flourished. And his young wife brought new life to the old sage until he died peacefully in 1843, being buried in the cemetery at Montmartre where homeopaths form all over the world still come to pay their respects.

The book details how homeopathy crossed the Atlantic and became very popular in the new nation of the United States of America. It tells us who were the leading homeopaths in America in the 1830s and 1840s and reveals that homeopathy was used even to treat epidemics such as cholera. In 1849, where only 3% of the homeopathic patients out of 1,116 died whereas those receiving allopathic treatment lost 60% to death. But it was the creation of the American Medical Association in 1847, which began to purge homeopathy from its members. Hahnemann himself had also received strong opposition from the scientistic medical mafia of this day who because they could not explain exactly in purely materialistic terms its success in treatment, therefore set out to destroy him. They failed but this same attitude of anti-homeopathy infected the American Medical Association and with its chimera of explaining all illnesses in a scientistic framework, the founders of modern American allopathy decided there was money to be made by discrediting homeopathy.

The book explains this story in some detail. The role of Abraham Flexner and the attack on the homeopathic profession in America led to the closure of the homeopathic hospitals and their erasure from the historical record. It will sadly take more than two books to revive a more holistic approach to mental illness. One of the key points of Hahnemann's worldview was his belief in the spiritual side of healing - in effect homeopathy provides a mechanism for Spirit to interact with the body and restore it to its natural health. He became of a Freemason and his faith in God or the Divine Intelligence as the final cause of healing, no doubt seemed rather quaint to late 19th and 20th century scientific medical minds who decided that since all mental illness has a physical causation it must therefore have a physical cure.

The average psychiatrist on both sides of the Atlantic nowadays has become a pill-pusher for the pharmaceutical giants but often they are the first to admit they haven't really got a clue what they are doing. Perhaps the Scientific and Medical Network can re-open this conversation and work with the Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group (SPSIG) of the Royal College of Psychiatry to encourage new thinking about enlisting homeopathic and other approaches to healing mental illness in a way that can be studied and researched scientifically. My Institute's own project to rebrand the NHS as the National Healing Service, but keeping the same initials, would also facilitate such a move.