14: The decline and victory of Geel
The men in charge have always known how to win, regardless of if they succeed or fail
Once again, there’s a disconnect between the story of Geel told by the elites and the Geel of the commoners. In academia, the Geel question has been settled. Geel showed that it was possible to have our cake and eat it, too – we can have deinstitutionalization while keeping our institutions. In the actual village of Geel where people live – both boarders kept there as wards of the state and free residents – the Geel question was settled differently. People want to live in their own communities, with support on their terms.
The boarders in Geel are all elderly. They are people who have spent decades with their foster families and can no longer imagine returning to their communities of origin. One by one they are being moved to nursing homes and dying.
The authors of Geel Revisited explain the decline in boarders as the result of a shift from family farming to industrial labor and then to office jobs. Once both partners were working outside the home, boarding became impractical. This is unsubstantiated. Today there are more willing host families than current boarders, and each family can take in up to three boarders. Boarders participate in day programs, with transportation provided by the OPZ, so there is no requirement that families have someone staying home to supervise boarders around the clock.
Another myth is the idea that patients living in Geel were discharged after psychiatric medications became widespread. This demonstrates just how little thought people have given to Geel. In terms of mental health institutions, effective psychiatric medication means there are more mad people who need moderate and low levels of support, not fewer.
A significant portion of Geel’s boarders have always been intellectually disabled. As far as I know, there isn’t a medication that makes people with intellectual disabilities go from requiring support to being able to live independently.
Changes in our understanding and treatment of epilepsy have changed things, although Roosen’s account from the 1970s includes notes on boarders who were living in Geel because of their epilepsy diagnosis.
Why is the Geel program vanishing?
One of the reasons Geel is so popular among the antipsychiatry movement is that the mad are removed from their family of origin and provided with a new family who accepts them as they are. The declining participation in the boarding program suggests that many patients would prefer to remain in their community of origin. It also suggests they don’t want a new family, since they end up in group homes instead.
I haven’t spoken to enough people to say for certain that this is the case. I haven’t come across any evidence that patients are choosing other housing options over foster care in Geel.
From the very earliest records of boarding out at Geel, families of patients sent to Geel often objected to their placement, as it was so far away as to make visiting impossible. It was not boarders who were calling the shots in the 1950s when the program was seeing their numbers fall. Boarders were only given a choice in their housing situation in the 1990s, when the laws changed. Even today, it’s not clear that they’re being given a meaningful choice. Are they offered the option of boarding with a foster family in their community of origin? Are they told about the option of being placed with a family in Geel? Are they presented with a selection of group homes? Can they arrange for their own housing and access a menu of support services?
The fact of the matter is that agencies stopped sending patients to Geel. Perhaps once it was completely legal to keep disabled family members at home more families fought to have them stay there. Perhaps the deinstitutionalization movement made it seem undesirable to send patients to what is essentially a penal colony. Perhaps as the way long-term care funding changed Geel became less appealing. As the people of Geel might say, who can know the ways of asylum administrators? The answers have been lost to history.
The great success of Geel
One of my regrets is not writing my masters thesis on the incredible marketing that has turned waste water from a power plant into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Geel’s tourist campaign has flopped almost as spectacularly as the Blue Lagoon’s has succeeded – and that’s something we know has been going on for over 500 years.
In the process of failing, Geel has successfully branded itself as “the compassionate city” and Triest is the “Saint Vincent de Paul of Belgium.” They have somehow managed to have a penal colony adopted as the utopia of the antipsychiatry movement. A settler icon recast as an exorcist has become the patron saint of the psychiatric survivor movement. Academics, politicians, and psychiatric survivors have now spent decades working together to keep an 18th century settler colonial penal colony going.
It’s oddly comforting to see that there’s nothing new about fake news or misinformation campaigns. While we worry about social media algorithms destabilizing global politics or AI exterminating humankind, the story of Geel demonstrates how most misinformation campaigns are far less problematic. People incarcerated in Geel were not treated any worse than they would have been in any of the other places they might have been sent. No one’s keeping it a secret that they imprisoned people there for 200 years.
The people in charge of Geel are claiming to be exponentially more popular and more special than they are. Penal colonies are a dime a dozen. Boarding out is so ubiquitous as to not warrant mention. No one came from out of town to make pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint Dymphna before the Geel Research Project. It’s all there for those who bother to look.
There were a few lies, sure, but most of them were so fantastical that there was no risk that a reasonable person might find them credible. Except for those pesky American journalists and academics whose gullibility is unfathomable.
They get sucked into the storyline presented by the tourist office. We write about how unique and magical Geel is because we want a simple solution to a complicated premise.
My experience visiting Geel was profoundly disturbing. It’s a cliche that the victors write history. This showed me just how true it is. In Geel, the nobility twisted the beliefs of peasants into their own nearly unrelated story and used it to blot out the actual practices of the peasants. Even today, when the resources providing me with historical context and archival documents are so numerous as to be overwhelming, the flood of inaccurate articles and “content” is what floats to the top.
For over fifty years, liberal elites have taken grassroots social justice movements and used their version of the story of Geel to redirect their protests. And it’s worked! A little rebranding and voila – we have people yearning to be sent to a penal colony. We’re working to save the asylum and the exorcisms rather than building alternatives. We’ve internalized the idea that the neurodivergent can never be accepted by society, can never participate in society, can never contribute to society unless it’s part of a charity project conducted by saintly peasants chosen by God. The elites have convinced us Geel is unique and irreproducible – and now it’s fading into history.
We want to fight for our freedom, yet here we are fighting for our chains.