Institutionalisation, Navalny and the nature of madness

Denbigh Asylum

I enjoyed a lively discussion last night with some friends over a few beers on the merits of committing the mad to asylums. I am broadly in favour – it seems clear to me that some people are not equipped or able to function independently because they are, to use the medical term, bonkers.

Such people often exist at the busy junction of mental illness and substance abuse, and plainly need low-intensity care and supervision that we lack the facilities to provide. They usually end up in prison (they are not criminals or dangerous to anyone but themselves), in hospital (they are not physically sick) or homeless (given Europe’s comprehensive welfare provisions, they are not destitute). It is likely that they shuffle between the three situations, losing teeth and getting steadily madder, before dying lonely little deaths as burdens on the parish. There is a clear need for a category of institution, neither a prison nor a hospital, to put them in. We used to have them – they were called lunatic asylums.

Lunatic asylums were mostly Victorian buildings, beautifully built and situated (due to the common belief among caring professionals that putting mad people in lovely places made them less mad. I am not a psychologist, but this seems logical). They housed a variety of people: Down’s patients, schizophrenics, the feeble-minded, non-functional alcoholics and drug addicts, the occasionally violent, depressives and melancholics, the intractably promiscuous, maniacs, would-be self-murderers, the authors of some moral but not criminal wickedness, and a whole host of otherwise unloved and unsupported oddities. Certainly, some interns would probably not be committed today – homosexuals or unmarried mothers, for instance – and the institutions were not without scandal, but most of the people who found themselves in lunatic asylums really did need to be there, because we had nowhere else to put them. Like many necessary but unfashionable ideas, asylums fell victim to our post-War fit of political pique, and most were closed by the mid-1980s. “Care in the Community” followed, but the necessary funding did not, and that Community was not quite the warm embrace that the word implies. Most of the West replaced an effective and necessary system with nothing at all.

My main interlocutors were prominent Estonians over certain age and of a broadly libertarian bent. One of them, Tõnis, was a fly in the Soviet ointment in his youth, and had gotten himself into dreadful trouble with the authorities for translating Orwell into his native language. A trained clinical psychologist, he was quick to point out a problem with my thesis – how are we to define madness?

Andrei Snezhnevsky, notable twat

The cautionary tale Tõnis told was that of Soviet doctor Andrei Snezhnevsky, the Lysenko of psychiatry, who created a revolting cottage industry in diagnosing political dissidents with an entirely fanciful mental illness called “sluggish schizophrenia”. The symptoms of this disease were so subtle that they were often unnoticeable except, conveniently, to Dr Snezhnevsky himself. More stupidly still, sluggish schizophrenia was said to be a progressive disease – those in whom even Dr Snezhnevsky could detect no symptoms might develop them in time, and thus preventative confinement was justified. The key symptom was, of course, an interest in unconventional politics. Rejecting Soviet political orthodoxy, regardless of how reasonable the grounds, thus became a mental illness whose absence could not be definitively proven. Thousands of conscientious opponents of socialism, including Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin Volpin and Viktor Fainberg, spent years and decades in Soviet mental hospitals.

The parallels with Orwell are obvious. In 1984, O’Brien demanded not just Winston Smith’s acquiescence and submission during his lengthy torture, but his acceptance of the Party’s truth and the rejection of contrary ideas as obviously wrong. Winston was not required merely to agree that 2+2=5, but to believe it, wholeheartedly and without reservation. Winston’s belief in a self-evident truth was not a political dissidence to be stamped out, but an insanity to be cured. Winston was plainly not insane, and the Party was. This is the nature of dystopia.

It is clear, then, that madness and subsequent institutionalisation is open to political abuse, both in fact and fiction. People who do not function on the officially approved plain of reality can be branded insane and dealt with accordingly. However, outside of totalitarian regimes, is this feasible or likely?

Alexei Navalny, Russian dissident

One of my partners mentioned the case of Alexei Navalny, a political gadfly in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, recently the subject of one of the KGB’s elaborate poisoning plots. Following the release of a documentary revealing Putin’s unofficial wealth (in the form of an enormous private palace, in the Mid-90s Essex Shopping Centre Style, that cost an alleged $1.35 billion to construct), Mr Navalny is now in prison and precarious health. Like his Soviet dissident forebears, it seems that his only crime is to be conscientiously opposed to Putin’s revolting regime and politically active against it. However, the 1984 analogy does not survive contact with Mr Navalny’s situation.

The Lakewater Outlet Centre, Chelmsford

I am no friend of Russia under current management. Some conservatives view Putin as a kind of saviour, a last bastion of traditional European civilisation, but this puts them in the same category as those Western leftists that Lenin gleefully labelled “useful idiots” – uncritical supporters of a hostile foreign power in which they imagine some ideological synergy. If Putin wishes to defend European civilisation, I am sure he could do so without murdering policemen in sleepy English cathedral cities or annexing lumps of his neighbours’ territory. As I live and hold property only 150 miles away from the Red Army, I feel I have some skin in the game.

Putin’s power in Russia is a fact, as is his willingness and ability to do unpleasant things to maintain it. For an Englishman to support Putin from abroad may be stupid, but for a Russian to oppose Putin from within Russia is mad. Unlike Orwell’s Party, Putin does not require his subjects to believe anything irrational or untrue, however. Mr Navalny is not asked to believe that 2+2=5, but merely to accept that Putin is in charge and will not tolerate open opposition and criticism. There is no ideological angle. There is no need to have faith in some perpetually inevitable socialist utopia. Mr Navalny need only accept reality and keep quiet. One might admire him for his evident bravery and willingness to take a principled stand, but the insanity in this situation is not on Putin’s part, but on Mr Navalny’s.

But Russia is not a liberal democracy. We must look closer to home for examples. Fortunately for this discussion, we have a good case in the United Kingdom.

Philip Luty (1965-2011) was a British firearms enthusiast and amateur gunsmith, known for publishing Expedient Homemade Firearms, an instruction manual for making a sub-machine gun with minimal skill and readily available materials. This book was wildly popular, and Luty-type sub-machine guns have been discovered all over the world. Mr Luty was a political libertarian who strongly believed in the right of men to arm themselves for their defence. I have some sympathy for this view, but the laws of the United Kingdom beg to differ.

A Luty sub-machine gun

For non-British readers, though our islands originated the phrase “the right to bear arms”, this right does not exist in law. It is strictly prohibited to carry any kind of weapon (even a lockable folding knife) without reasonable excuse, which self-defence is not considered. Firearms are very tightly regulated. Pistols and repeating rifles are banned completely, and shotgun magazines may only hold 3 rounds. The British Olympic Pistol Team trains in France. Even non-lethal self-defence devices such as pepper spray and tasers are illegal (and indeed are legally considered “firearms”). This prohibition covers objects that, though not weapons, might be used as weapons (a professional footballer was once prosecuted for having a keyring in the style of a suntetsu, a short blunt piece of steel used in Japanese martial arts, in the glove compartment of his car). Certain types of firearm may be owned for hunting and sport but are subject to strict licensing and codes of use. There is a right to self-defence in law, but it is illegal to carry any implement to effect it.

Ridiculous though I find this, it is the law, and it is widely supported by the public. The UK does not have “gun politics” in the same way as the United States. Few people own firearms and most people have never seen one. This is very unlikely to change as nobody really wants it to.

Philip Luty

Philip Luty disagreed with this situation very strongly. He believed, erroneously, that the 1689 Bill of Rights, as well as some fanciful common-law liberty, guaranteed his legal right to own and carry whatever firearms he pleased. The Bill of Rights, like its American successor, is a significant legal and constitutional document that originated many commonly used phrases, including “cruel and unusual punishment”. It is still in force in some form in several British-influenced countries including the UK, but it is so heavily amended and contained so many caveats that it effectively guaranteed no rights at all. Further, it is the British political tradition that Parliament may legislate in any way it chooses, and is not bound by the Acts of its predecessors.

Mr Luty took his own quixotic interpretation of the English constitution and made a lifestyle out of it. He designed and made several illegal firearms and published instructions for others to do so. The authorities took a dim view of this and he spent most of his life in and out of prison. Not content with repeatedly prosecuting him for his flagrant disregard for firearms law, the Crown decided that his activities represented terrorism and he was tried accordingly. He died of cancer in 2011 and is remembered in chiefly American libertarian circles.

There is no evidence that Mr Luty ever harmed anyone personally. His saw his actions as a form of political protest against unjust law. We can agree or disagree with him, but it is hard to see him as a malicious actor. That said, he was completely and utterly bonkers. He went up against the power of the Crown over an issue of vanishing political significance in pursuit of rights that British people do not want. Like those of Mr Navalny, his crimes were political rather than harmful, but the consequences of them were obvious and severe, and he could not hope to win the battles he fought.

So how should we have dealt with him justly? He was not dangerous or evil, so gaol seems vaguely inappropriate, yet at the same time his determination to break the law in unacceptable ways means he could not have remained a free man. His sickness was not physical. He was mad, and we ought to have had facilities where his madness could have been managed.

After all, what else are we supposed to do with men like that?

Denbigh Asylum, in ruins