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Wear Your Attitude Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by Nandita Saikia, India Jun 22, 2004
Culture   Opinions

  

This isn't an ad for a clothing company but it is the first thing which came into my mind after I heard about a Belgian town called Geel (which is pronounced 'Hale' and lies 25 miles away from Antwerp). It's a town where, for over a thousand years, the mentally ill have been welcomed and treated as people rather than as freaks. Even in the middle ages, when the insane were caged and carted around from place to place like circus animals, they found a place where they would be accepted, eccentricities and all, in Geel.

Legend has it -- and strongly believing that legend has its foundation in reality, I've never argued with it -- that around the year 600 A.D., a pagan Irish king called Damon was widowed. He traversed the Western world in search of another wife but found none. Instead, after his return home, maddened by grief, he mistook his daughter for his wife -- who had been a Christian and who had had their daughter baptized -- and made advances towards her. Horrified, the daughter fled home on the advice of her confessor and tutor, Gerebernus who accompanied her along with the court jester and his wife.

It is the story of this woman who is referred to as Dympna (although her name was not passed down through the ages) that gripped the imagination of the people. In the 13th century, a Bishop of Cambrai had a man named Pierre collect the oral tradition and write her biography ever since which she has been regarded as the patroness of the mentally ill. Dympna apparently crossed the North Sea, landed at Antwerp and ultimately made her way to a small oratory dedicated to St Martin on the site of present-day Geel. There, fame of her holiness spread because of her devotion to the poor and ill. Her father, however, tracked her down -- his search led him to Belgium and when an innkeeper in the area refused to accept his currency because it was difficult to exchange, he realized that she must be close since a country innkeeper would not have otherwise known about the difficulties involved in using foreign exchange. This helped him to zero in on her location and when he ultimately found her, he beheaded her tutor Gerebernus and asked her to marry him. She refused and in a fit of rage, he killed her too. The story says that his sanity was restored at the moment of her death.

A church was built at the site Dympna was killed and it was believed that the insane could be cured by her power to drive away demons -- insanity was, at the time, believed to be caused by demon-possession. A sickroom was also built by the side of the church by the end of the 13th century. Pilgrims travelled long distances in hope of a cure and performed rituals of penance by crawling barefoot under the reliquary containing the bones of St Dympna, as she is now called. The local people were accepting of the mentally ill and often, families from abroad would leave their 'possessed' relative with a caretaker in the town.

This was the beginning of the foster family system which is active in Geel even today. If the natural family could afford it, they paid for the expenses of the ill person but if they couldn't, the church provided the funds. With the 1797 invasion of Napoleon, the convent which ran a hospital, the church and the sickroom were all closed but Napoleon could do little to change the tradition of welcoming the mentally ill. So inviolate was this tradition that even in Nazi Europe where the mentally ill were killed, they were allowed to remain untouched in Geel since the local community was very protective of its 'boarders', as it call them. In fact, a number of Jews also apparently escaped the clutches of the Nazis by pretending to be insane in the town.

Geel has a lower crime rate than the surrounding communities and the mentally ill mingle freely with the townspeople of Geel. ome of them can be seen openly hallucinating and behaving in a manner which would still attract derogatory comments in the rest of the world but in Geel, there are no raised eyebrows and they receive the respect all individuals deserve.





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Nandita Saikia


Nandita Saikia has had two books published: one on Business Communication and the other on Human Rights. She has has contributed to a number of publications on a wide range of subjects although her primary interests are domestic violence and choice inhibition.
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