The Town That Takes Strangers Home

Picture this. Someone knocks on your door. They have just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital. You won't be told their diagnosis, because that isn't allowed. You get a name, and that's all. Then you're expected to give them a spare room, feed them from your own pot, and take them along to the vegetable garden and the market. Possibly for the rest of their life.

In the Belgian town of Geel, people have done this for seven hundred years.

You might guess the people there are simply kinder than the rest of us. But then why didn't the same kindness take root in the dozen Flemish towns around it? The real answer is less flattering, and more interesting. It began with a murdered girl and a village that had nowhere to put its visitors.

The legend goes like this. Dymphna was an Irish princess in the seventh century. Her mother died young. Her father, crazed with grief, decided to marry his daughter, because she looked like her mother. Dymphna fled across the sea to Flanders and hid in the forest near Geel. Her father tracked her down. When she refused him, he cut off her head.

Afterwards, says the tradition, the troubled and the tormented began to be healed at her grave.

By the thirteenth century, so many pilgrims with mental illness were arriving at her tomb that the town church couldn't hold them. So the canons, the clergy who ran the church, started placing visitors in the homes of local farmers. At first only for a few weeks, while prayer did its work. Some people didn't recover. Some simply stayed with the family that had taken them in, for good.

Nobody passed a law. Over generations, this grew into a system that psychiatrists now hold up as a model. An ordinary family takes in a person with a mental illness. In Geel that person isn't called a patient. They're a boarder. And the family lives beside them the way you'd live with a distant relative.

The scale was staggering. In nineteen thirty-eight, Geel had about sixteen thousand native inhabitants and around three thousand seven hundred boarders. Nearly one person in five on the street was a psychiatric patient living in someone's home. Long before that, in eighteen twenty-one, the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol had visited. He wrote that in Geel the insane had, for the first time, been raised to the dignity of simply being sick people. Not locked up. Not in chains. Sitting at the family table.

The rules for the host families are simple, and strict. You never reveal the diagnosis. The boarder should enter your home as a person, not a case file. Words like "madman" or "patient" are out. Only the name. No family may have more than three boarders at once, so that a home stays a home and doesn't turn into a ward. You take them to the garden and the market. You encourage their bond with the children. And here's a curious thing. Where there's no blood tie, oddities are easier to bear. Psychiatrists call the opposite "high expressed emotion", the tense, critical closeness of relatives, and it turns out to heal worse than a calmer sort of care. The police know about all this, and are rarely called. Meanwhile, caseworkers from the town's psychiatric hospital are reachable around the clock.

Many boarders stay not for years but for decades. The average is about thirty years. Some have lived in one house for seventy-five, becoming part of the family's second and third generations. One elderly boarder celebrated his fiftieth year in town with the mayor and a brass band.

And what if it goes wrong? If a boarder breaks down, or frightens the neighbours, or can't cope? Then they go back "inside". That's what Geel calls the psychiatric hospital. Life with a family is "outside". Going back in feels, to almost everyone, like a punishment. Officially, it's just a breather while a new treatment plan is worked out.

The state pays the family a modest daily sum. Sources give figures from forty to forty-seven euros, and about half of that reaches the family. Treating the same person in an ordinary psychiatric ward costs the state almost six times more. But money doesn't explain Geel. The researchers who've studied it admit that today, cash is hardly anyone's reason.

And the system is thinning out fast. Where once about one family in five took a boarder, now there are around five hundred boarders in a town of over forty thousand. That's less than a tenth of the peak. The reasons are ordinary. A farming town became an industrial one. Families now have factories and offices instead of fields. Both partners work. More people live in apartments, not houses with gardens, and they value privacy more than their grandparents did. One resident admits that this may be the last generation who still knows how to live with someone else's trouble so close.

And yet, house by house, street by street, Geel carries on with something nobody has managed to repeat at this scale. A person who hears voices sits down to supper not in a ward, but in a family. And the reason is as plain as it gets. In Geel, they have always done it this way.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.