‘I was friendly, and I wasn’t afraid.’ Photo: William Tuke, undated, from the Wellcome Collection
Retreat and go on: Bob Johnson on William Tuke
‘Those Parkhurst prisoners taught me that we are all born lovable, sociable and nonviolent.’
William Tuke (1732-1822), who founded The Retreat, still holds two surprises for us. The first is the breathtaking simplicity of his approach; the second is its extraordinary success. Who would have guessed that the way to cure wayward people was to treat them as you wanted them to be, not to castigate them for making no sense, for acting unsocially, or for failing to benefit from harmonious interactions with the rest of us?
To Tuke, Quakerism was therapeutic. He thought that since we were members of a Society of Friends, this should reflect how we treated those we didn’t understand. Be friendly. What could be simpler?
Psychiatry today is in desperate straits. It’s crying out for an overall pattern, a strategy for understanding and helping. Same with our prisons. You might have thought it impossible to go back to 1796 and find the answer, but that’s not so. Science journalist Robert Whitaker scoured medical records for Mad in America. The outcomes are irrefutable. The Retreat was strikingly beneficial – any facility of today that could match its successes would merit a Nobel Prize.
So how can you account for this? Why are mental health services so wanting today? Let me take you back to Parkhurst, where I worked with prisoners too dangerous for Broadmoor. One serial killer I got to know summed it up: ‘When I was eighteen, I got married, I had everything I wanted – but I could only talk with my fists’. What does this tell you? First, that he had found his tongue. You may be sure he didn’t say this to begin with. No, then he was all set to kill every two years, including, at one point, me. But I talked to him as if I meant it. I asked if he was surprised to find that he had bottled anger from his childhood. Slowly it dawned on him that infant-rage was obsolete in a twenty-four year-old – far better to verbalise what earlier had been unspeakable (literally). I was respectful, I was friendly, and I wasn’t afraid. And I knew what I was looking for: the real, adult human, hidden inside an overgrown toddler.
For the deeper background, you have to go even further back, to 1660, when early Quakers declared violence unacceptable. The Peace Testimony insists that human beings can be peaceable. What insight. What a revelation. And how sadly it is missed today.
None of the fifty murderers I worked with wanted to be violent. That’s a shock. And for those unacquainted with our testimony, it’s simply unbelievable. Those Parkhurst prisoners taught me that we are all born lovable, sociable and nonviolent – and we want to get back there.
I call for two new Testimonies: one for Peace-of-Mind, and one for Prisons. Tuke set Quakerism to work. We still have his glorious (and proven) insights. Surely we can find a way to spread them more widely, so that all can benefit.
