Lou’s View 8/5
By Lou Bernard
It is worth noting that mental illness is not exactly a new concept. For as long as humans have existed, there have been some who don’t function as well as others. I’ve found examples of this in the old newspaper archives repeatedly, old articles about people who are clearly mentally ill. What’s changed is how kindly and sensitively we handle it.
For instance, these days you’d never see an article headlined,”His Mind Unbalanced.” But that’s exactly what ran in the newspaper on November 29, 1899, right on the front page.
It happened on a Monday night. A stranger arrived in Hyner, evidently drawing some attention to himself by the way he was acting. People were already beginning to wonder about him when he decided to try and throw himself into the river.
A group of local men grabbed him and prevented him, of course. Nobody in his right mind wants to dunk themselves in the Susquehanna River in late November; you might as well just give yourself hypothermia at home and save the walk. So some locals stopped him from hurting himself. Now, note that I said “in his right mind” up above, which this guy clearly was not. So as soon as they stopped him, he thanked them by attempting to dive into the river again. Taken by surprise with the second attempt, the local men pulled him out.
It happened a couple of times over the course of half an hour or so. The article reported,”At Hyner he threw himself into the river several times, but was prevented from going into the water again by some of the men of Hyner.”
Well, enough was enough. The authorities were called, and the man was taken to Lock Haven and put in a jail cell, which at least was somewhat drier than the river. “Lodged in jail for fear that he might do harm to himself or others,” said the article, and it wasn’t the first or last time that had happened. I’ve written before about the jail housing a man who claimed to be God, another who trashed his cell in about five minutes, and one who upon his release kept trying to break back in.
District Attorney Robert B. McCormick, B.F. Geary, and Dr. William Armstrong were appointed by the court to talk to the man and handle the situation. In the media, this was referred to as a “Commission of Lunacy,” which is what passed for compassion in 1899.
In discussion with the sheriff and the commission, he said that his name was James Keenan, and he was from Buffalo, New York, but had recently been a deck hand on a boat in Lake Erie. I’m assuming he didn’t try to throw himself overboard at that time. He offered no explanation for his compulsive attraction to the freezing river.
“He was found to be mentally unbalanced, but from what cause the commission was unable to learn,” the paper reported. “He was not violent in his actions and it is thought that he will recover in a short time.”
In the late 1800s, the general response to mental illness was to kick the problem down the road a bit, which was something of an improvement over previous treatment methods, such as spinning your finger around the side of your head while gesturing toward the victim. So that’s essentially what the commission did, turning the man over to Sheriff Robert D. Peck. Peck, in turn, took the man to Danville, where he was turned over to the appropriate mental health professionals. “Taken to the Danville Asylum for the Insane,” as the local newspapers phrased it.
From that point, the local news kind of lost interest in the story, so I can’t verify what eventually happened to James Keenan. But hey, if the treatment didn’t work, at least in Danville they have rivers.
