Cruelty Was Kind to Victorian ‘Mad’ Mothers

Far from being callous brutes, Victorian-era British husbands who declared their post-natally depressed spouses mad and had them locked up may have been doing them a favor, a scientist said on Tuesday.

Doctor Cath Quinn of Exeter University’s Center for Medical History said the broad label of “puerperal insanity” applied to the supposedly mad mothers covered such a broad array of symptoms that it helped the women identify with each other and aided recovery. By contrast, the multitude of different tags now attached to post-natal mental illness made sufferers more isolated and was therefore more likely to exacerbate the condition. “In losing the puerperal insanity label, we have lost something valuable that helps women today contextualize their experiences” she told reporters at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. She said what the Victorians at the turn of the 20th century had termed puerperal insanity covered conditions running from so-called baby blues to real puerperal psychosis or real madness. A study Quinn carried out of 356 admissions and 110 sets of case notes at southern English mental asylums in the Victorian era found that 70 percent of the women recovered and went back to their families within two years. She accused psychiatrists of trying to boost their own profession at the expense of their patients by creating the huge array of modern descriptions of the condition out of the far broader Victorian-era definition. “In regaining the elastic label you can put a whole range of things together,” Quinn said.(Source: British Association for the Advancement of Science: Reuters Health News: September 2004.)