The Oxford English Dictionary, the bible of linguists, took more than seventy years to compile. When its progenitors first embarked on the project they envisaged a time frame of ten years for completion of the work, but identifying every possible word in use in the English language since 1150 ad required that they consult a formidable number of written sources. When after five years the researchers had only got as far as “ant” in the dictionary, they realised they would need the help of volunteers. They therefore sent out an appeal for assistance from interested members of the public.
One of their advertisements in the form of a pamphlet was found in 1879 by Dr William Minor, a former American army surgeon, in a book he had bought. He had served with the Union forces in the American Civil War, and was an antiquarian book collector with an impressive personal library.
Dr Minor systematically went through volume after volume of his collection to look for quotations, and he made an alphabetical list of every interesting word he encountered. He would send these to the Oxford team leader, Dr James Murray, every week for twenty years. Dr Murray was later to write that without Dr Minor’s contributions the Oxford English Dic-tionary would have been deprived of four centuries’ worth of quotations and word origins. Only one person, he said, had contributed more to the work than the American surgeon.
The point about this story is that Dr Minor was a murderer incarcerated in Britain’s Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, as it was then known. He had suffered from delusions in the United States, and had moved to the UK in 1871 for a change of atmosphere. It did not help, and he murdered a man in London whom he did not know. At his Old Bailey trial he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to Broadmoor, where he continued to suffer delusions, although that did not appear to impair his work on the dictionary.
He did have two advantages which the average inmate there did not enjoy: one was that he was not without financial means and continued to receive his US military pension, making it possible for him to buy books; and the other was that following the intervention of the American consul the authorities allowed him two cells instead of one. Presumably this was to accommodate his library. While psychiatric understanding was much more limited in those days, nevertheless there were those at the time who regarded his work on the dictionary as a form of therapy.
Nowadays Broadmoor Hospital is one of three such institutions in the UK, and is run by the National Health Service and not the Prison Service. It has not been without its scandals, particularly in more recent times, triggering reforms. What its existence does mean is that people with mental health issues who are also violent do not have to be referred to the normal hospitals dealing with patients suffering from psychiatric problems and personality disorders. Most of Broadmoor’s patients still arrive in the hospital through the criminal justice system, or after having been diagnosed with a mental illness in prison. Such was the case with Peter Sutcliffe, one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers, who was treated there for paranoid schizophrenia. Nowadays it is the norm for artistic endeavour, especially art, to be encouraged as a form of therapy in Broadmoor.
Guyana has no such equivalent. In fact, as Psychiatrist Dr Bhiro Harry said earlier this month, the National Psychiatric Hospital in New Amster-dam is in a lamentable state, and in addition, the authorities have been inconsistent about taking action to address the plethora of mental health-related illnesses in the society. He also adverted to the fact that Guyana does not have the facilities to offer psychiatric care to prisoners even although there is now a forensic psychiatrist. There are, he said, just two beds in the prison to house prisoners with mental health-related issues.
In our report on Dr Harry’s address we cited the case of 41-year-old Ryan Sunthgolam of Canefield, East Canje who was killed and Steve Lionel Roberts, 38, who was injured after a patient pulled out a window and grill mesh and attacked them in June this year. Questions have been asked, as we noted, about the ability of members of staff to protect residents from violent patients, among other things. And as for the question of prisoners’ readiness to be released back into the general population, it is unclear whether any evaluations are carried out.
We also referred to the case of Ronald Wong and his uncle who were discovered dead in their home in Coomacka in May this year. Wong had been released from prison for attempted murder, and went to live with his uncle. He was believed to be of unsound mind and is thought to be responsible for the death of his uncle.
Issues of mental health still fall under the seriously outmoded Mental Health Ordinance of 1930, and as a consequence the National Psychiatric Hospital is the only facility exclusively dealing with people suffering from psychiatric or personality disorders. Dr Harry is not the only one to regard the statute as totally inappropriate for our circumstances; so does Attorney General Anil Nandlall. He told the Support for the Criminal Justice System programme earlier this year that it would be amended with particular attention being paid to the penal system. His particular concern was reducing the prison population, and one of the ways of doing that, he said, was by addressing mental health issues.
According to the AG, part of the SCJS project was considering the question of mental health, and efforts were being made to collaborate with the psychiatric department of the Georgetown Hospital to have a programme in conjunction with the judiciary and Guyana Prison Service to provide assistance for those in the penal system who needed it. He went on to make reference to the habit of magistrates making Orders directing that persons be sent to the Psychiatric hospital, although that institution appeared unable to accommodate the numbers sent there as a consequence of such court orders.
Mr Nandlall described many offenders as suffering from mental health issues, and since the condition was a sickness, imprisonment would not work. “So you go into the prison,” he said’ “You receive no treatment for mental health…you come out back…the sickness becomes worse…and that’s what took you in the prison in the first place. So you go right back there, you get worse…you come out back again and it’s a vicious cycle that ends in death.”
The public has yet to see what the revamped Mental Health Act will look like, and what exactly the provisions catering for defendants who are mentally incompetent to plead, as well as those already in prison suffering from mental health issues will be. Not all of these cases will necessarily have even a tendency to violence, but the AG also needs to ensure the new arrangements cover those who do, including cases admitted to the Psychiatric Hospital, but not through the penal system, who subsequently display violent outbursts.
There are many aspects of mental health which desperately need to be addressed, but at least it is a sign of progress that at last the authorities are directing their attention to the penal system in particular.
