Art Lovers discussion

'Hysteria; Psychosis; Depression; Schizophrenia'

The stories of women who were institutionalized or treated for the women’s disease of “hysteria” abound in historical literature. Often, the symptoms of hysteria arise from a life of being denied the right to exercise one’s talents or abilities, when, instead, a person is forced to operate within the narrow margins of a life restricted by a straitjacket of cultural expectations. Hysteria itself assumes that the very essence of having been born female leads women to a skewed way of being in the world. If femaleness is located in the possession of a uterus, then the wandering womb of the hysteric confirmed the male expert’s view that to be born female made one susceptible to mental illness from the start of life.

Leonora Carrington was a celebrated artist in the Surrealist movement. She died in 2011 at the age of ninety-four;

Down Below is a remarkable but harrowing document, detailing as it does her parents’ decision to institutionalize her for depression

Carrington recounts how in the immediate aftermath of her lover’s arrest, she wept for several hours, and then induced vomiting for twenty-four hours in hopes that the spasms would ameliorate some of her emotional pain.

“I had realised the injustice of society,” she wrote. “I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then got beyond its brutal ineptitude.” She saw her stomach as the locus of society, and, by voiding her stomach, she thought to cleanse society.

Spain had endured a horrendous civil war as many had fought against Franco. Carrington immediately began sensing the suffering that people had endured, and again, she felt a lot of anxiety. “I realized my anguish – my mind, if you prefer – was painfully trying to unite itself with my body; my mind could no longer manifest itself without producing an immediate effect in my body – on matter.”

Carrington’s reactions were a direct result of the trauma of Ernst’s kidnapping by the Gestapo and, then, her presence in a country where she perceived that the red clay of Spain was actually dyed with spilled blood. If the physical reaction was bad, however, what followed for Carrington was worse. She attempted to pass papers to someone and was apprehended by Spanish Requetes officers, who forced her into a room where she was brutally gang raped. Carrington said that while she was being attacked, she continued to fight the men. Eventually, the men grew so tired of her fighting them that they released her in a large park, her clothes torn.

After the attack, Carrington kept trying to wash herself clean, and she performed these actions in front of witnesses. Convinced that she is “mad,” the British Consul turned her over to a doctor who evaluated her and agreed that she was insane. Without her consent, she was injected with high-powered drugs and taken to a sanatorium." (Cardiazol 'I learned later that my condition had lasted for 10 minutes; I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body." Down Below pg 40)

"Rather than accepting the diagnosis that Carrington had become insane (and the drugs she was injected with were used for treatment of schizophrenia), it seems much more likely that the trauma caused both by the Gestapo raid that took Ernst away followed by the horror of her rape may have induced a black depression. Some kind of intervention may have been necessary to prevent Carrington from resorting to suicide. But what was done to her in the sanatorium is yet another reminder that the for-her-own-good history of the treatment for mental illness is fraught with methods that seem more appropriate to the torture chamber.

It turns out that, during this time, the sanatorium was treating her depression with a drug called Cardiazol. Injected into the spine, the drug causes such violent convulsions that they mimic electroshock therapy. In addition, the drug seems to have induced a sense of such intense hopelessness that Carrington told her doctor, after awaking naked on the floor:

“I confessed to myself that a being sufficiently powerful to inflict such a torture was stronger than I was; I admitted defeat, the defeat of myself and of the world around me, with no hope of liberation. I was dominated, ready to become the slave of the first comer, ready to die, it all mattered little to me. When Don Luis came to see me, later, I told him that I was the feeblest creature in the whole world, that I could meet his desires, whatever they were, and that I licked his shoes.”

Even though this was her first experience with Cardiazol, the treatment continued, each time leaving her feeling that she had endured grand mal seizures and an emptying out of her self.

Carrington’s story is a painful reminder of the ways in which normal emotional reaction to a violent culture that denigrates women’s bodies becomes the excuse for new methods by which culture can persecute women, especially those who are creative and intelligent and who are conscious of wanting more than the proscribed lives they are offered."

https://www.signature-reads.com/2017/...