Time for change

Back in the dear old early 14th century, “the pox” was considered a punishment from God. If you had it, you were evil and it was a just fate. You had wronged. You had failed. You deserved to die. The trouble with this idea was that there came a time when it struck a lot of people that this was not quite true. In the mid and late 14th century, a lot of people died of it. At once. Whole villages vanished. And this happened across Europe, though sadly without BBC News to report it. Either way, the emphasis shifted a bit from individuals to groups of people being ‘bad’. The thinking was that the older generation had got it a bit wrong, but it is alright, because we have found out about it now. And, co-incidentally, all the bad people are dead so there is nothing more to worry about. Keep praying for good harvests and to avoid Armageddon and it will all be fine.

And all was fine, until the next time. That came as an influenza outbreak in the 16th century that killed even Mary I. Influenza, like other infectious diseases, was not seen quite as a punishment from God, at least not by enlightened scholars. Despite that, talk of it was enough to put the wind up the peasantry, much as Fox News does today. We probably get a balanced view from Shakespeare, who seems to suggest that by this period it was understood that such an illness could be spread, and thus could also be contained. Containment of a sort was achieved by restricting the movement of people (a plot device in Romeo and Juliet). Things had moved on a lot since the God-fearing Christians of pre-Renaissance England had thought that prayer and being nice to God would absolve them from death-by-anthrax.

What stepped things on from this point was the discovery of the cell by Hooke about fifty years later. A while after this the bacterium was identified, and then not long after that the cause of the likes of scarlet fever, tuberculosis and so on were begining to be understood. It was infectious disease, and a lot of them could be knocked out by taking antibiotics. As a result we now enjoy a whole host of other ways to die, many of which were unknown in medieval Britain, chiefly because if you made it to 30 and had children you were having enough of a party not to give a damn one way or the other.

Treating illness with suspicion and neglect is ... bonkers

This is not the whole story though. People in the dark ages were put to death for things we would term illnesses, or at least, long-term medical conditions. People who had Tourette’s syndrome were considered to be possessed by demons. People with manic depression or paranoid schizophrenia were thought of either as ludicrously spiritual and were revered, or just mad and were burned. Sadly, none of these things has the benefit of being caused by a plentiful life-form that can be observed under a microscope. It is ‘psychological’, and unless you know someone who is like that, it is an alien and often uncomfortable world for to encounter. A world as terrifying as the one where coughs and sneezes meant you were an emissary of Satan, I have no doubt.

Needless to say, I do think it is ‘Time for a Change’. Treating illness with suspicion and neglect is as bonkers as many of those who are neglected for that reason. What I am nervous of, however, is whingeing and moaning as a means to increasing awareness. Complaining that change is required puts ‘mental health issues’ in the same bracket as every other good cause, not least the most nauseating of all, the ‘needy’.

So what am I, and my fellow mentalists, to do? Well, we need to play a long game. This is for the same reason that going to the Middle Ages and telling people the real reasons why they had syphilis would not work. People need to be educated at a pace at which they can learn. In order for that to work, all of us need to learn. We need to learn what causes people to be manic-depressive, or depressive, or whatever. That means spending money on science (obviously), but it also means talking about it, and it means changing. So, let us change.