Mental Illness As a Weapon
Illinois renamed a mental health center for Elizabeth Packard, who was forcibly institutionalized at an asylum in the late 1800s by her husband.
In 1863, Elizabeth Packard was freed from an asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois, where she had been institutionalized for three years against her will. She had been sent there by her own husband, a Calvinist minister who claimed she was mentally ill because he disagreed with her idiosyncratic beliefs on religion and women’s rights. Once liberated, Packard became a crusader for the rights of women and against forced institutionalization.
While Packard’s efforts were essential in her day in influencing some local U.S. governments to rethink forced institutionalization, mental health is still being wielded as a weapon against people who do not share the beliefs, lifestyles, and thoughts of the powerful. This is especially true outside the U.S. In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch found that women, children, and men were often forcibly detained because of “psychosocia…