Mental Health Centre in the Village of Geel, Belgium

Presenter: Jim Hutchings:  
Mental Illness has always been with us. Patients were sometimes treated quite cruelly in attempts to effect a cure. Other times, quite kind approaches were used to try to make desired changes. Over the centuries, one small community in Belgium stood out as a model for the treatment of mental illness. We will examine the story of Geel and how it became, for some, the "Gold Standard" for the treatment of the mentally ill.