Madness and revolution a close relationship

• May 18, 2024

In September of 1910, as part of the celebrations of the centenary of the independence of Mexico, the then president of the Republic, the general Porfirio Diaz , inaugurated the General Asylum La Castañeda ; which was an architectural complex that could accommodate 1,200 patients and where a new way of treating mental illness led to a seedbed in the modern psychiatry of our country.

According to the doctor in History Andrés Ríos Molina, researcher of El College of Mexico , The Castañeda It had four phases of development that coincided with various social and political ruptures during the Revolution. At first, the hospital was opened with 350 men sent from the Hospital for Insane of San Hipólito and 429 women from the Hospital del Divino Salvador.

Almost all the patients of this first stage, had been diagnosed as epileptic since at that time it was thought that those who presented these conditions, could become people aggressive and prone to commit some crime or attempt against morality at any time. For this reason, families preferred to leave them locked up so as not to have to bear the stigma of madness and the possible criminality .

The Revolution explodes

In his article entitled "Madness in post-revolutionary Mexico. The Asylum La Castañeda and the professionalization of psychiatry, 1920-1944 ", published by the Historical Research Institute of the UNAM, Ríos Molina indicates that until the end of 1913, the population of the hospital changed substantially . Most of the men were diagnosed as alcoholics and women like neurotic and, on average, almost all were discharged four months later. "Why the first inmates of La Castañeda were not those epileptics that led to the old asylums for the insane but that were alcoholics and hysterical Who "healed" in a matter of months? The novelty did not lie in the medical discourse or in the administrative parameters to regulate admission. Rather, the novelty was the asylum itself", Says the specialist.

The majesty of its different buildings made The Castañeda was seen by society as a space for punish Y to correct to subjects whose behaviors broke the parameters of normality. It had changed, the idea about the kind of madness that deserved to be locked up.

The new type of patients who arrived at La Castañeda

The changes that occurred in the Mexican capital between 1914 and 1916 they were not strangers to the hospital. The civil war that had been unleashed "It resulted in violence, hunger and migration for thousands of people. The traumas of war , the epidemics and the lack of water and food plunged the city into a complex crisis. This had a direct impact on the type of population that entered the insane asylum, since the seriously ill patients who died of diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, enteritis, etc. prevailed. Thus, this new use that society gave to the asylum as a hospital was governed by the logic of war", Adds the COLMEX researcher.

Ends of the Mexican Revolution

Between 1917 and 1920, a new attitude of the family of hospitalized patients stood out: 43.1% of the patients, after eight months of confinement, were discharged because the same families requested their departure, committing themselves to offer the necessary care. "This new relationship with the asylum was not mediated by changes in the medical discourse or in the policies of the administration. Is distrust to the insane asylum could be a metaphor of the same suspicion that the constitutionalist State aroused", Says Ríos Molina. During the Mexican Revolution, after 1921, La Castañeda ceased to be an underutilized space and the number of patients skyrocketed: in 1930 there were about two thousand and in 1942 it reached an exorbitant amount of 3,400.
 

Video Medicine: Art of Anarchy - The Madness -4/29/17 (May 2024).