But in its origins it's a compassionate and sacred word meaning "sanctuary, protection, inviolable shelter" To remove someone from asylum is sacrilege. What sort of crime is it, then, to pull asylums down?The final ruination of our institutions of compassion was effected on economic grounds. It's too expensive to look after poor and damaged people when you're hell-bent on looking after rich and robust ones Tory policy, New Labour policy same difference. But behind the savage economic reasoning lies a long history of dissatisfaction with all categories of abnormality.
Who were we to declare one man mad and another sane? Who were we to set standards of normalcy? See that fellow with dead eyes and a scar across his brow? That was Jack Nicholson, lobotomised for being rebellious in the cuckoo's nest. Over the years we came to hear of women who'd been locked away in madhouses all their lives, because as girls they'd succumbed to the madness of pregnancy. Demented scientists attached electrodes to the brains of homosexuals, and zzzzzz, hey presto, they were average, decent heteros again. Bedlam, right enough.Funny how every step forward in civilised thinking is also a step back. No one needs help, no one should be sequestered, madness is sanity, sanity is madness, there is no such thing as odd, because there is no such thing as even That ought to have been a deliverance, but it wasn't.
It's important not to mistake Dr Johnson's "no human mind is in its right state" for the emotional relativism of the 21st century. Saying that we are alienated from the right state of our minds is not the same as saying that every deviation is therefore desirable, or that there cannot be a wrong state because there cannot be a right.However much he feared the uncertain continuance of his own reason, Johnson was not sentimental about the maladies of the mind. In his words, imagination is a hunger "which preys incessantly upon life", a source of creative energy but also proof of our relentless instability. Then the Romantics happened, and no one could be unstable enough. We remain heirs of the Romantics, still feeding on honey-dew and listening to the prophecies of mad poets.And so, we honour every eccentricity of mind and body, loose lunatics we cannot bear to call lunatics on to the streets, and as a consequence by the law that says we make worse whatever we try to make better have no inviolable sanctuary to offer a poor woman who is too depressed to live.
