Have a look at the list below, what I will call quick fix solutions (which I already mentioned briefly in a footnote at the bottom of this post) all supported by the establishment in the past in Ireland, some of which survive to this day:
~ Mental asylums where people were committed for years and years if not decades or their entire life. (And I ask here how many people were diagnosed as having a psychiatric illness because they didn’t conform to what their family expected of them)?
~ Mother and baby homes where young women went to have babies for adoption, mentioned in the previous post.
~ Places of detention for young children, known as Industrial Schools, or Reformatories, also mentioned in the previous post.
~ Prisons, where, in addition to people who have committed crimes, mentally ill people or even people with disabilities were sent.
~ Schools where violence to children (also known as corporal punishment) was allowed and even encouraged.
~ Lobotomies where surgeons operated on the brain by drilling holes into it to heal schizophrenia and other conditions.
~ Dispensing massive amounts of drugs in prisons or mental asylums in desperate attempts to change inmates’ behaviour for the better.
~ Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) which involved giving mentally ill patients electric shocks in the hope that it would cure them.
~ Leaching of blood.
~ And for those of more exotic beliefs, exorcism, witches’ spells, etc.
~ Various flavours of the month [1] that occasionally come knocking!
It was usual, in such quick-fixes that:
1. The person being fixed was almost always a passive recipient rather than an active participant in his/her healing.
2. The family had peripheral involvement, or sometimes no involvement at all in how the fixing took place.
Well so much for history ….. I will ponder on what is happening in the present day in the next Sub-Chapter.
[1]. As falling in love is a quick fix of sorts in our lives, and involves temporary denial of reality, I propose that the Pillars sometimes fall in love with shiny, new, quick-fix ideas that sound good. This temporarily suspends reality but in a short time when reality asserts itself again it is obvious that quick-fix was a false dawn and it is forgotten about as quickly as it appeared!