Once again, a small online memorial dedicated to one of the nameless psychiatric patients who around 1870 populated the Sainte-Anne asylum in Paris. Just an old image and a fitting piece of old (classical) music to go with it. Or if you prefer, give this man just a brief moment of silent thought.
This is another one of the photos that Henri Dagonet, the Paris asylum’s director, had taken of inmates to illustrate his textbook on mental illnesses (more about this in my Medea post). Today, the haunting images from Dagonet’s 1876 book form the oldest known collection of photos of psychiatric patients.
Earlier posts in this series were Medea and Orestes. So let’s give this anonymous person the name of yet another tragic hero from ancient Greek mythology: Oedipus.
The original Greek Oedipus was a prince who unknowingly fulfilled an oracle’s prophecy by killing his father and marrying his own mother. When he found out the truth, he blinded himself by cutting out his eyes and he disappeared into the void, constantly haunted by the raging Alecto, one of the Furies.
The Oedipus we have here (classified by Dagonet as a depression patient) is looking away from the camera: blindly staring into some other kind of void, tormented by the raging depression inside his head. He will never see you or me.
But thanks to this chance portrait, this Oedipus now lives on – in a way. We will never know his actual name, or what happened to him after the photo was taken.
We only know he was depressed enough to find himself locked away in the asylum, perhaps to prevent suicide, although very little in the asylum will have made him feel any better.
Back then, mental hospitals were more like a dark filthy prison than like a real hospital. Full of shouts and screams and sobs and groans, patients of all kinds locked up together, these 19th century asylums were no pleasant places to be. They certainly did not yet focus on curing depression. So if you ask me, it’s much more likely that this man died in the asylum, than that he managed to ever get out again.
Oedipus, may you rest in peace.
We may complain about a lack of understanding today, or about the nasty side effects of our antidepressants. But back in 1870, there was hardly any understanding, and there was no effective antidepressant medication at all (unless, perhaps, you would consider opium derivatives an antidepressant).
Maybe, just maybe, as depressed as we may feel, we should be a little more grateful for living today.
Oedipus Music
In 1692, composer Henry Purcell wrote music to John Dryden’s play Oedipus, A Tragedy. With the lines
Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile:
Wond’ring how your pains were eas’d
And disdaining to be pleas’d
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop from her head,
And the whip from out her hands.
Here it is, sung by the wonderful South-Korean soprano Sumi Jo (please do take a look at her her website here).
Click the green “Play” button – if it’s missing, install Flash.
For a full StayOnTop playlist, go to the Music page.
• tip: So now you want to tell me you’re so very very depressed, that to you it wouldn’t make any difference if you had to live in 1870, like Oedipus? Well, sorry, but I don’t buy it.
May 21, 1949 –
I often times think i’d be better off locked up… Not because i’d enjoy it per say… and not in reference to how they were back then… back then they would just remove part of your brain/shock you/experiment on you and you’d be a zombie… i’m sure that would be even worse tourture… however i’m unsure how much of “you” is still there to if you’d even be cognitive of it or just be a physical shell… but that is another subject…
i often think that because i’m not sure if a physical prison/hospital would be much of a difference or be any worse at times than the mental prison i’m already in.. i’ve been commited once… it was a horrible experience having ones freedom taken from them against thier will.. but.. If anything i ate more regularly, and actually did some form of activity while there..
not just that though… but… more importantly… because society tends not to like to look at or deal with depressed people.. they seem to either diminish what we are going through, just don’t believe it is all that bad, or just don’t want to deal with it… I was told by my girlfriend that as bad as it sounded she preferred me in the hospital as at least then she didn’t have to worry about me..
that seems to be the rule of thumb with the elderly and those of us with depression… just put them away somewhere so we don’t have to concern ourselves with worrying about them… how they are doing.. if they are eating.. etc… it’s very sad… and rather sick in my opinion… makes you wonder who really are the sick people? the ones hurting who want an ear of understanding.. or those who would rather not deal with another human beings problems so would rather just have them locked away out of sight out of mind..
…
anyways back to the subject..
i’d submit that a prison in ones own thoughts and emotions, where they can’t escape thinking or feeling a certain thing, can be far more restrictive than even being in a small locked room. At least in the physical prison, if not in a mental prison as well, you’d have the freedom to think or dream with whatever positive or negative spirit or energy you so desired…
they look at that picture and see a crazy person… There was a time i would have done the same… i would have thought there was a good reason for him being there… But now after being in such a mental prison.. knowing the constant and daily anguish and torture involved…
i see but a soul… who once had dreams.. a family… hopes… plans … had all the things we today and they then considered normal… instead of understanding and help to free himself of the mental prison he found himself in, they placed him in a physical one as well… probably never to have those dreams, hopes, plans, family again.. as you said, as happened more often then not back then… perhaps never even be heard of again..
family didn’t go to visit back then… it wasn’t something to be talked about… it would give the family a bad name so they wouldn’t tell others.. who wants to have a crazy person in the family?.. so it was the silently dealt with illness… kind of funny how far we’ve come… yet how far we haven’t..