Jamaica doesn't like madwomen in the attics

"WHEN EDWARD Rochester met Bertha Mason, he thought she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Sparkling and gregarious, Bertha soon captivated him and the two were married.
It was then he discovered Bertha had a dark side. Beneath the sparkle lay a mentally unsound mind.
In the gothic novel, Jane Eyre, the story continues. Mr. Rochester keeps his mentally ill wife locked up in a room, away from public eyes and the rest of society. The novel shows that under old paradigms, it was thought that mentally ill persons should be locked away, if not at home, in a mental institution built like a fortress."

No, we're not trying to summarize Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea one more time. As a qualified Brontëblog reader you don't need that. The preceding quote is, as a matter of fact, not a summary but part of a press release of the Mental Health Services Unit, The Ministry of Health of Jamaica. The quote continues:

These days, the paradigm is changing. More countries, including Jamaica, treat most persons with mental health problems in community settings instead of institutions.

We, at BrontëBlog are always fond of stories that have a voluntary or unvoluntary twist. And you can agree that a government included (in a general sense) in the so-called West Indies use our madwoman in the attic for a mental health care argumentation has a beautiful twist, doesn't it?

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Sequels