Written by : Healthy For Your
Title : Living in open air is healty
Living in open air is healty
An essay from Alfonso Pascale about the therapeutic and rehabilitative functions of farming, since the Illuminist Age till today
Since its origins, the scientific debate that gave birth to psychiatry held in high regard the therapeutic and rehabilitative peculiarities of farming. One of the first to discover them was Benjamin Rush, one of the father of the American psychiatry, at the end of the XVIIIth century.During the Ancien régime age, mentally ill patients were hospitalized in public hospitals and treated like common patients and they often were chained in some hideous center.
With the Illuminist Age, the reform of the hospital systems includes the treatment of mental disease in the “normalization” process through which the “alienated”, as this type of patient was called at the time, was brought back to rationality and common sense.
Therefore, curing the madness meant diagnose the problem of the border separating the rational from the irrational, in order to solve it through the therapy. It was not just about healing a sick person, but it was also about the utopian challenge of rationalizing society. The rational development of society demanded, according to the Illuminist thought, a complex intervention to reform institutions, for which the contribution of the scientist and the physician was supposed to be instrumental. The context of the reform of the hospital included an institutional project of care of madness with far reaching consequences. The asylum, projected as a part of a complex utopia of “normalization” of the social ethics, was supposed to assume a very particular function in the plan of recovery of the mentally ill, turning into the core of the cure, the representation in space and time of rationality.
In that project, the agricultural work is considered “a sort of balance of the spiritual bewilderment, for the attractive that farming inspires, for the natural instinct that brings man to fecundate the ground, thus satisfying his own needs with the fruit of his own work”.
Still, few felt the aporia between the “asylum” model and the prerogatives of farming.
Mental health in the countryside and in the cities
Mental diseases were very common in the rural society. The reports relevant to the conscripts who were declared unfit for military service during the XIXth century and in the first half od the XXth century are informative of the diffusion of these diseases in the countryside.
Several cases of illness were due to in-family marriages between close relatives, which were popular because of the traditional prejudice of disapproving the marriages members from different communities and also due to the isolation of rural areas.
Mentally disabled individuals were generally cared by their own families and they were often assigned tasks in their farms and villages.
With the inurbation of farmers and their employment in factories, more people in the cities too resulted affected by mental disturbances. Life rhythms and systems, so different from farming life, were often the cause of discomfort and alienation for the newcomers of the urban centers. Unfortunately, the cities did not have an organization of space and time capable of including in the social context these patients at the time, so that many of them entered the hideous asylums of those days, where they were destined to remain in chains for the rest of their life.
Life in the countryside was totally different, in spite of the isolation: bodies used to operate following the heart and lung rhythms and the chants mimicked the rhythms of work. Seasonal and liturgical rhythms often determined the sense of time in farmers. Any situation had a precedent and would be followed by analogue circumstances. Past and present were not disentangled, but constituted a unified living dimension, not just a series of many units separated by the clock. A feast or a bonfire, a good or a bad harvest, a family event were part of memories that were kept as a more natural reference than a calendar.
For this reason, a song or a tale about a century old event still brought strong emotions along. It was instead almost unimportant if that even had happened recently or a long time before. The traditional time did not have invariable measurement units and did not conceive a true separation between working hours and leisure hours. Wasting time (going back and forth, waiting times, taking a break) was something which basically went unnoticed, because it was perceived as part of the daily routine and not seen as a matter of debate.
In Italian, the word “tempo”, can indicate either “time”, duration or “weather”. Today these two concepts are separated, unlike the farmers of the past, who identified the Summer as the season where they could work longer hours. Time was work and work was a lifestyle, not a way to make a living.
In light of these considerations, it clearly appears the significance of the discomfort and alienation that hit the part of rural population who left the countryside for the big cities to work in factories, where life rhythms were totally different.
Agricultural colonies
When there was awareness that mental disorders were related to the sudden shift to the urban lifestyle and to the industrial work style, potential remedies were searched right in the rural world. This was, for instance, the case of the alienated from Gheel, populous village in the middle of Belgium, of the agricultural colony of Clermont-Ferrand, in France, of York, in England.
Gheel was a village close to Antwerp where about seven thousands people lived at the beginning of the XIXth century and famous because hundreds of mental patients were sent by relatives to stay with the locals. This village did not have any asylum and the patients were housed in the house of local farmers or in the surrounding farms, in number of one, two, three at most, together. In this colony the alienated people were part of the life and, if possible, of the work of their hosts. Visitors from outside were surprised to observe that “although freely to move, these ill were never reason of serious trouble for pregnant women or children”. This was even more surprising considering that Gheel housed a remarkable number of these people: from 400-500 in 1821, up to about 800 at the half of the century.
In the agricultural colony of Clermont-Ferrand, a very important center of the Massif Central in France, the model adopted consisted in a farm as a detachment of an asylum, where inmates had a job in the fields, under the opinion that farming was “one of the most precious means of healing and well being for mentally sick patients”. The creation of farms as detachment of asylums was considered a “new progress for the future of alienated” and gained a certain credit and diffusion in Northern Europe.
The Retire of York was founded by Samuel Tuke, a Quaker, whose religious group had taken care of mentally ill under the guidance of George Fox since 1649, in 1796. The Retire was a country house where inmates had the opportunity to live in clean air, cultivating gardens and undoubtedly improving their health.
Asylums were immediately put under scrutiny in Europe
Asylums found an institutional definition little by little during the first half of the XIXth century, but around mid 1800s it underwent a deep crisis, from humanitarian and scientific point of views. Wide portions of the public opinion, especially in France and Germany, reported the liberticidal nature of the system of asylums.
In a big campaign by the press, asylums were indicated as the bigger mistake of the modern age, a residual of ignorance and barbarity. Wilhelm Griesinger, one of the most influent representative of the medical culture of his time, shed light with exemplary clarity on the nature of the crisis of the medical science of mental disease. He provided with evidence to the theory that the “good” asylums, that is to say built according to the newest ideas of the French and German psychiatry, gave as disappointing results as the “bad” structures, most of all in terms of the problem of chronicization of inmates. He concluded that any place, not necessarily the “asylum”, could become a place of care, thanks to the action of a good clinician. He visited Gheel 1866 and was deeply impressed to the extent that he formulated his hypothesis of a way to “freedom” for chronic patients and related it to “colonization” programs, like the housing of ill subjects to farmers was called.
Being the institution of the asylum under attack, agricultural colonies became, then, the new frontier to solve the problem of the growing mass of chronically ill people and to recover the values of open air life, of a free relationship with nature, of the quintessential therapeutic work: farming.
In spite of the admiration for the Gheel experience and the interest in farms as privileged places to socially include the so-called alienated, which had become very popular among the European psychiatrists, Griesinger’s message did not influence the policies, but only generated experimental programs in some countries.
Italy had to wait for Basaglia’s movement
These ideas reached Italy before the introduction of the Illuminist reform, so that they did not produce any effect. After almost half a century of vain attempt to introduce new norms pertaining to mental health, like it had happened in France and other European countries long before, the Giolitti law was approved only in 1904. Neglecting the deep crisis that affected the psychiatric science in its view of the therapeutic worth of asylums, the law introduce a purely segregating function to these institutions, opening a fracture between scientific knowledge and politics.
Later, in the ‘60s, Franco Basaglia indicated the priority of jumpstarting a process of institutional transformation that was supposed to lead to the destruction of the asylums system. The focus would then become not so much the definition of new reform projects as the end of an age where the psychiatric thought had fueled a social and scientific utopia, just before letting it wreck. Only in the following, once canceled forever the asylums reality, it would be possible to create the conditions for a general debate, open to the whole community, around a project able to move from the utopian overtaking of the mental category of “normality” as primary assumption of the human condition. The handicapped person would find the understanding of his real needs only in a society whose central value would be the human being, in his concrete and daily oscillation between health and illness, without proposing a segregating response again.
The new law in the field of mental health, approved in 1978, took direct inspiration from Basaglia’s ideas and not only accepted the destruction of the “asylums system”; it also assumed as a cornerstone the “treatment of the disease”, identified by the ability of local healthcare services to provide with an effective response to the specific case, therefore abandoning “the determination of the borders of the disease” and then “the identification of its categories”. The principle of this law was not anymore the “normalization” of the alienated, like in the reforming projects of the XIXth century, but is right to have a “response to the need”, through the network of social services. Once the access to asylum is interrupted, the “contradiction between institution and territory” is solved by the distribution of services on the territory, which should promote a “new order in social processes”.
Therefore, the modern agriculture, in its business and multifunctional forms that would develop in the following decades, would turn again into a space of social life and activity to privilege for mentally disabled individuals.
The therapeutic and rehabilitating functions of modern agriculture
Since the ‘30s, therapeutic and rehabilitating programs based on the cure of plants were practiced. After WWII, a true curative discipline was developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which conjugated medical with botanical expertise: the Horticultural Therapy, recently introduced in Italy under the name “Assisted therapy of plants”.
The animal assisted activities and therapies were born in the USA in 1953, thanks to the children psychiatrist Boris M. Levinson who, on the base of his experience, defined them as “a bunch of specific practices based on the meeting with an animal who is not owned by the user and is part of a relationship among three subjects, where the animal carrier’s goal is the achievement of a relationship able to activate the assistance capabilities of the animal and useful for the pathology of the user”. These activities were developed integrating the concrete experiences with the Zooantropology, a science which studies the interaction between animals and humans. Since the ‘60s the use of pets in this regard was indicated as “Pet-Therapy”, later more appropriately defined “Animal Assisted Therapy” (A.A.T.) and “Animal Assisted Activities” (A.A.A.).
In particular, in Italy the hippotherapy has been practiced for more than thirty years. This discipline, positively contaminated with classical horse riding, has contributed to the diffusion of social horse riding. Nowadays, thanks to the progresses that the new ethology has done during the past fifteen years, we know much more about horses and we can even put ourselves in the perspective of the horse in his relationship with a human. Lately, onotherapy is becoming popular as well thanks to the particularly intense and empathic relationship that donkeys are able to establish with people.
Ever more growing is the empirical evidence that the contact with the cycles of nature and life, typical of farming, helps in achieving a greater autonomy and self awareness with respect to other activities such as work in factories or in office, which are more repetitive, frustrating and alienating and, for this, source of discomfort. This happens also because humans tend to desire living close to a green meadow or to a pool of water, because of an innate feeling that the biologist Edward O. Wilson calls “biophilia”. Even the more obscure and gloomy sides of nature, revealed with floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other calamities, is somehow necessary to complete the human experience: it is, indeed, the symbol of the wild dimension, of that mysterious sphere that has ever been source of any poetry.
For much of the scientific world, the specific resources of agriculture and of the rural world are basically being considered more and more like useful leverages to enhance and qualify the ways to include not only mentally disabled individuals, but an ever growing variety of weak people.
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