"Bedlam" It Never Left

“If they are not mad when they go into these cursed Houses, they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they there suffer....Is it not enough to make anyone mad to be suddenly clapped up, stripped, whipped, ill fed, and worse used? To have no reason assigned for such treatment, no crime alleged, or accusers to confront?”

— Daniel Defoe English novelist, writing about the conditions in asylums in the 1700s

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, social outcasts were labeled mentally ill, and if they were not tortured at the stake, they were imprisoned in the most squalid conditions. As authors Franz G. Alexander, M.D., and Sheldon T. Selesnick tell us, “Should they survive the filthy conditions, the abominable food, the isolation and darkness, and the brutality of their keepers, the patients of Bedlam [in England] were entitled to treatment,” including bloodletting and various “so-called harmless tortures.”

According to Dr. Jean Garrabe, president of the World Psychiatric Association International Jubilee Congress held in Paris in June 2000, “...conditions for helping the mentally ill have changed radically.”94 Dr. Garrabe could not be more wrong. Indisputable evidence attests that “Bedlam” is indeed alive and happening, and not just in England.

It has been left to CCHR and other human rights groups to investigate and expose such modern-day atrocities.

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