I have wondered whether, if Michael had been differently treated, things would have been very different. This thought has been very much on my mind since I have been visiting various communities where schizophrenic people are supported and richly integrated. One of these, which is of great antiquity, is the little town of Geel in Belgium. In the 13th century a woman was raised to sainthood, there’s a whole story here, and became the saint of the insane, and around 1280, people started to come to Geel hoping to be cured by the saint. Well, whether or not they were cured, they were taken into the homes of people in Geel, and Geel, for more than 700 years, has become a special communal home for the mad. At the end of the Second World War there were 15,000 inhabitants of Geel, and 5000 people with mania, schizophrenia, or whatever, all of whom had a family life, all of whom worked in the fields. You saw in the streets of Geel, deeply regressed or manneristic schizophrenic people, whom one felt should be in a back ward, and yet they... they were playing chess in the cafés or chatting in the streets, or working... one of them had opened a bi... a shop for bicycle repairs, and one saw what a full life a deeply schizophrenic person could have.
I have also seen some of the power of communal support. I visited a... a Gould Farm up in Massachusetts, which originally started as one of these quasi religious sort of moral regeneration places, it’s now become much more secular, but when you... when you go to Gould Farm, and it’s a real working farm which is almost self-sufficient, I think, economically, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish staff from patients. [Erving]Goffman wrote famously about asylums and the, you know, the infinite gulf between staff and inmates. It’s not there in a place like Gould Farm, moreover, there are friendships there, and there is work for everyone to do. The cows have to be milked, you can't say, 'I’m sorry, I’m regressed, Christ told me not to milk the cows’. The others will... will say, 'Go fucking milk the cows'. And the... the work and the friendship and the community hold people together wonderfully, and prepare them for the real world, so-called. So, a place like Gould Farm comes between acute hospitalisation and the real world. And you need also a place like Gould Farm to teach you how to cook, and how to work the washing machine or whatever, how to look at a map. It’s not just the hallucinations and... and delusions, it’s the lack of social skills, of worldly knowledge, which can be so destructive to people with schizophrenia.
