Should We Forget the Trauma of Past Mental Health 'Care'?

I recently came across a very interesting comment from a former child psychiatric patient.  This woman had been admitted to children’s mental unit back in the 1950s, and she was responding on an Internet forum to various posts from other former patients.  Many of these other posts had referred to various horrific ordeals, including physical and psychological abuse, all of which had been experienced while in the ‘protection’ of a supposedly caring service.  But this particular woman, now in her 70s, advised them to try and forget their experiences: ‘[Y]our only hope is to put [it] out of your mind and never let them win.’ By ‘them’, of course, she meant the perpetrators of the suffering these people had known.

Is this the best approach to the trauma of past mental health ‘care’?  Is this something that those concerned should forget?  Is forgetting the only way to ‘defeat’ the institutions and individuals responsible for such awful memories?

The answers to these questions will be different for different people.  It is certainly the case that people need to move on in their lives and live in the present, not in the past.  But does this mean they must forget the past?

My book, Delivered Unto Lions, tends to answer these questions with a definite no.  I wrote it from the assumption that the past needs to be remembered, that lessons need to be learnt.  Needless to say, for some people past memories will be so painful that it would not be a good idea to deliberately call them to mind.  But for many of us, we can use our memories in a constructive way as we move forward and live our lives.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu