Last Saturday my husband and I had to take his mother to hospital to be assessed. Not knowing the outcome or duration of the visit we went to a medical museum in the grounds of the hospital.
It was fascinating. It was also very humbling. We were transported back in time, down a street in the slums of Leeds in 1842. It was dark, smelly, with rats and fleas crawling all over the walls and floors. The sound effects helped to magnify the poverty and degradation suffered by men, women and children just existing from one day to the next. Survival of the fittest but at what cost?
There was a huge array of surgical instruments dating back to Roman times. To us, fortunate enough to be living in the twenty first century, they displayed some amazing, and often amusing, diagnoses and treatments. The Black Death, tuberculous and influenza wiped out huge swathes of the population in the UK and around the world.
I doubt that few people lived long enough to get dementia and mental illness certainly wasn’t the scourge to society it is today. As we live longer and find cures for diseases that wiped out families in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new ones seem to be replacing the old.
it is very hard for us to accept that the person we are looking at and speaking to is physically the one we know and love, yet mentally there is a dis-connect which needs to be treated. Dementia is one example, but other types of mental health problems can affect anyone at any age.
Any one of us can be struck down by this scourge that causes damage to the brains of unsuspecting healthy, strong men and women. It sweeps away all logic and brings heartache and pain. Millions of families are just trying to get through their stress-filled busy days earning an honest living and wanting to support their loved ones as best as possible.
Until now mental illness has been swept under the carpet. It’s been a family’s embarrassing secret, rarely discussed. But, thankfully, times are beginning to change. Walking around that medical museum last week I can imagine that mental illness, in all its forms, will follow a similar path. It has been formerly recognised and research has begun. It will take time to find a cure but hopefully we have already reached the stage where we are given the necessary tools and medication to manage it.
Maybe future generations will visit museums and be able to track the process which has led to a cure. They will feel sad and amazed at some of the initial quack treatments offered to these poor people. But, like the Black Death, smallpox, polio and tuberculosis, cures would have been found and the quality of our lives vastly improved.
Until then we have to rely on what is currently available and a very strong support network of family and friends. This support network is crucial in the management of all debilitating, cruel mental illnesses and, until we have a cure, as important as the current treatments offered.
Its Wednesday and I’m on my way to the care home for their weekly exercise class. This is my tiny contribution to improve the quality of a few people’s lives but every little helps. 👠
Jenny Burrell 