Institutional Torture: Where Treatment Transformed into Penalty
Stepping into the Shadows: A Tour Through the Grim History of San Servolo and Mental Health Institutions
Peeking into glass cases, you'll find remnants of a different era - 18th-century straitjackets, rudimentary electroconvulsive devices, and perforated skulls from the early days of psychiatric exploration. These aren't props for a horror flick; they're real relics, displayed at the Museum of San Servolo in Italy. Far enough from the city to mute the screams, this abandoned hospital has transformed into a grim reminder of the darker side of human history.
Fernando Gómez, author of Journey to the Center of Asylums, muses, "I wrote about cemeteries thinking they symbolized the worst of our fears - death. Then I came across loss of freedom in prisons. Eventually, I realized that loss of identity was the most harrowing ordeal of all."
Once a monastery, San Servolo morphed into a psychiatric hospital cloaked under the guise of a healthcare facility. As Gómez elucidates, "It wasn't about healing. People were kept hidden away, living and dying behind concrete walls."
In White Terror - Asylums and Psychiatric Hospitals of Horror, Gómez isn't talking about ghostly apparitions; he's referring to the abuses experienced by patients in these institutions. "The first straightjackets, dating back to the 18th century, tools for trepanation like saws or hammers, electroshock machines inspired by techniques from slaughterhouses to subdue without resistance - these weren't means of healing, but rather tools of control."
San Servolo tells a grim tale, not just of the West's psychiatric history but also of orphanages, reformatory schools, juvenile detention centers, and boarding schools where discipline was meted out with brutality and where care disguised itself as punishment.
Not every chilling institution needed to be cursed; it was enough for someone to suffer in silence within its walls. As Gómez points out, "Sometimes, the real terror is the present, not the supernatural."
In Paris, establishments like La Salpêtrière weren't just for the mentally ill; vagrants, prostitutes, and people from the lower classes were admitted, too - sometimes because they had no other place to go, and other times, to secure their wealth for the rich and powerful who sheltered behind their ailments.
Gómez echoes the sentiments of other writers, emphasizing, "Many fortunes have ended up in men's hands because women have been incapacitated and admitted to these centers." In these institutions, obedience was the price for survival, and disobedience resulted in eternal silence.
Ghost stories may have no place in these walls, but terror was all too real. The guards were the real monsters, and there was no place for mysteries. The horrors of San Servolo and its counterparts in Venice, Paris, London, Brazil, Scotland, and Mexico serve as a stark reminder of the abuses committed in the name of care and healing.
Mental health institutions like San Servolo, although initially posing as health-and-wellness facilities, often enforced control rather than healing, using average methods such as early straightjackets and electroshock machines that resemble those used in slaughterhouses. In today's health-and-wellness discourse, the focus is on healing and improvement, yet the average person might be surprised to learn about the dark history of mental health institutions.
