31: The price of the myth of Geel
Does it matter if people view Geel as a magical place inspired by God?
This is part 31 of a series. To go back to the very beginning, start with part one.
The gushing media coverage and blog posts full of longing about the Geel family care system do us a disservice. The fantasy version of Geel is employed as a way to derail the fight for better community care. The Saint Dymphna story tells us that the village of Geel was chosen by God as a refuge for the mad. This implies that the rest of the world was not chosen and is not intended to be a safe place for them. If Geel is singular and irreproducible then the rest of the world can safely evade responsibility.
The myth of an ancient, singular Geel is the opposite of the Clubhouse Model. This is ironic, since Geel was meant to be a demonstration project!
The myth of inclusion and equality
The idea that Geel is a magical place where there is no stigma supports the view that people with mental illness belong there, with the Good People, rather than in their home communities, with the normal, judgmental people. This story justifies the practice of identifying and isolating specific groups of people from the communities they are living within.
Boarders in Geel have always been labeled and stigmatized. Originally, please considered to be mad or behaving in problematic ways were sent to Geel to be exorcized of the demons that possessed them. Later, people were diagnosed by asylum doctors and sent to Geel if they were considered “chronic incurables.” I understand that language changes over time, but I have the impression that being possessed by demons and being a chronic incurable madman were not neutral terms at the time.
Much is made of the diagnosis of boarders not being disclosed to the host family as proof of Geel as a place without labels. The host family is made aware of what behaviors to expect of that particular boarder. Accounts of Geel suggest that everyone knows why everyone else is there, including what their diagnosis is.
“Among the six hundred and twenty houses which receive patients, most have their recognized specialities, and it is found that each have, from generation to generation, had the charge of those afflicted with particular forms of mental malady.”
It was policy to house boarders who were “docile, tranquil, well conducted, and amenable to discipline” in the village while placing those who were “epileptic, turbulent, subject to arbitrary attacks of fury or screaming, and otherwise difficult to manage” in the hamlets surrounding the village. Various hamlets each had a particular category of patient who was placed there.
Much is made of the use of the term “boarder” or “guest” rather than “patient.” This does not mean they are not patients. They are legally patients. Previously they were not free to leave town. They needed to conform to behavioral norms in order to avoid being returned to a locked ward. There were regular trips to a bathhouse to be inspected. They needed permission to do things like use a bicycle. Asylum officials could appear to inspect homes and ensure compliance at any time.
“The denomination they receive in the colony – for so we may indeed term it – is that of “Innocents;” and it not only well expresses their harmless and pitiable condition, but is eminently suggestive of the estimation in which they are held, and by the tender and compassionate solicitude of which they are the object.”
It’s telling that even today they are considered boarders and guests, often after decades of living with the same family. They have not become family members. They are like an uncle, like a sister. Some shops and restaurants in town supposedly have policies that prohibit boarders from entering. I have no doubt that there is real warmth in the community and love within households. Yet there remains an uncrossable line. They are not family members or even roommates. They are people who have been placed in a foster home and are being monitored by an institution.
The future of care at OPZ Geel is the same type of institutional housing that disability justice groups are protesting in other places. Dormitories on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital – just like dormitories on university campuses and assisted living facilities – are not the same as living with a family in the community or living independently. Residents are permitted to have a voice, while remaining subordinate to institutional authority.
Geel did not invent family care, nor did they invent the patronizing attitude people hold towards the disabled. They have always provided whatever was considered the most ethical care at the time by institutional authorities. They continue to do so.
The myth of uniqueness
Rather than normalizing a world without stigma, the story of Geel as it’s told serves to entrench stigma. It tells us that the mentally ill and intellectually disabled are only capable of being recognized as full community members if you are a special type of person – a person born to a family from Geel, who was raised in Geel, and who has been chosen by God to do this work.
“The inhabitants seem to have had a peculiar aptitude for the calling, and have always taken a particular pleasure in showing their hospitality to those who came to establish themselves on the spot.”
Much is made of how Geel hosted boarders from around the world. It’s made to seem as if people were sent to Geel internationally because of its fame as a compassionate community. In actuality, patients were being sent to Geel by state agencies and private pay families because it was more affordable than other similar options. “International” boarders had often been countrymen before the national borders shifted, as is the case with the Netherlands and France. While Geel has never been part of Germany, the train line connecting Geel to Antwerp ended in Germany.
At the height of the Colony of Geel, Belgium and the Netherlands were drawing immigrants from Spain, Portugal, France, and Germany, as well as hosting seamen and merchants from around the world. Patients sent to the Colony of Geel would have been a diverse group even if none of the patients were transported across national boundaries.
In the time since the family care system was created, the population of Geel has increased tremendously. Many people have relocated to Geel for work opportunities and affordable housing. The myth dismisses the fact that host families include newcomers to Geel.
When we look at the Colony of Geel as part of a system that rounded up and criminalized those considered undesirable, well, that’s not unique either. There is a reason that this practice continued as power passed from France to Spain to the Netherlands to Germany to Belgium and that’s because all of these countries were criminalizing the undesirable. It happened in the US in the past and it’s happening now, too. When places eliminate support and criminalize poverty, people end up in institutions they are not permitted to leave.
The myth of “it just happened”
During my quest to learn about the origins of Geel’s foster care system, I heard and read countless variations of:
“Pilgrims travelled many miles to her [Saint Dymphna’s] church in Geel, searching for miracle cures. When there was no more room in the church sick bay, locals gave them a place to stay.”
After all my learning about pilgrimages and faith healing, I finally discovered what was really going on. Nothing just happens in the Catholic church or the government. All charity, even that provided by individuals, was overseen by the church. In the eras when pilgrims were traveling to Geel in order to join the Order of Saint Dymphna, they were undergoing a bureaucratic procedure.
Undergoing an exorcism at a designated shrine certified that one was a member of the deserving poor and thus it was legal for that person to beg and to receive church support. People arrested for begging occasionally had their sentences commuted so long as they agreed to visit the shrine. While being locked in a closet for nine days sounds pretty extreme, I suspect some people would choose that over the often years-long process of enrolling in modern disability support programs.
Stories on the origins of Geel suggest that things simply unfolded naturally. First there was Dymphna, then there were pilgrims, then there was fostering.
“The Geel initiative was not based on the initiative of a churchman as in Valencia or a physician as in Pinel's hospital in Paris, but was an initiative from the people (peasants and burghers of Geel).”
Regulations and oversight aren’t a 21st century invention. A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages suggests that in comparison, today’s Venice and Barcelona are positively lax about regulating the entrance of tourists into their city gates and the letting of beds.
Any program where an adult is deemed legally incompetent and made a ward of the state or transferred to live with another family is a process that goes through the legal system. Even in places and times with low literacy rates, there are court and tax records. Foster families in Geel were approved, paired with boarders, and overseen by the church and state. Funding came from a variety of sources, as deemed appropriate by the church and state. There was a whole system to ensure that classes did not mix and peoples families paid what was felt to be their fair share of the costs of care.
“As the system developed itself, the organisation improved”
Ah, yes, the system developed itself. That’s a great way to distance yourself from criticism. If Geel’s foster care program was founded by Triest, he risked penalties for breaking the laws of both the church and state. Those with positions of power rarely face repercussions for breaking the law. Since Triest’s extralegal activities unfolded in a rural backwater and addressed overflowing asylums and economic troubles, people in power accepted his implausible explanation that the Geel foster care system had existed all along.
The authors of the myth
I probably ended up in Geel because of Jackie Goldstein. She read about Geel in an abnormal psychology book as a student and went on to spend her career spreading the gospel of Geel. She did not believe the acceptance and inclusion she saw in Geel was irreproducible, so she set out to visit other communities in the US to prove that there were other Geels. It resulted in a book I’ve mentioned before, Voices of Hope for Mental Illness: Not Against, With. It also introduced people involved in community health care in programs around the US to the ideal of Geel as a utopian community care model. As I traveled around North America to visit caregiver support programs and asset based community development projects, I ended up following in her footsteps.
Goldstein, for all her insight, failed to distinguish between institutional settings and therapeutic communities. She spread the myth that the Geel family care system was created spontaneously by the community, eventually gaining government recognition and support hundreds of years later. She and her predecessors at the Geel Research Project cling to this story, despite the complete lack of supporting evidence and all evidence to the contrary. There is no question that Geel is a total institution.
While RD Laing, Joseph Berke, David Cooper, and others later associated with the Philadelphia Association were spending the late 1950s and 1960s establishing therapeutic communities where patients were on equal standing with medical professionals, the Geel Research Project worked to rebrand a penal colony as a compassionate and empowering project of radical acceptance.
People associated with the Geel Research Project didn’t want to end institutionalization, nor did they want to keep people entirely closed off to society or demand they conform. The myth of Geel was created to provide a more palatable alternative to patient-led communities and patient-led acute care, like the Solteria Model. Like Triest, they wanted to keep people isolated while creating a kinder institution.
The biggest problem with the myth of Geel is that it encourages us to dismiss the fact that people with disabilities have always been a valuable part of community life. It does not take a special type of person to respect someone with a disability.