Dutch housewife and autobiographical writer, whose testimony on the practice of “mental hospitalisation” changed the Dutch laws on insanity.
She wrote about her hospitalisation for insanity after her husband died: “De wanhoopskreten in de inrichting worden door de wereld niet gehoord. De familie hoort ze niet en de gestichtsmuren zwijgen als het graf. Er is geen controle, geen toezicht, geen bescherming voor ongelukkigen die minder dan een dier, die als het uitvaagsel van de mensheid worden behandeld. De dierenbescherming zou daar nog een vruchtbaar terrein voor haar werk hebben.” (“The desperate cries in the institution are not heard by the world. The family does not hear them and the foundation walls are silent like the grave. There is no control, no surveillance, no protection for unfortunate persons who are less than an animal, who are treated as the extinction of humanity. Animal protection would still have a fertile ground for her work there.”)
She was admitted to the isolation unit because the physician in charge found her too bold (“brutaal”), Rianne Oosterom writes in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (7:59, August 19, 2018): “When the dejected Johanna Stuten was brought into a draughty building on 8 September 1889, she thinks she fell into the hands of bandits. She is “led through a long series of corridors and under the ringing of keys as in a prison, into a large, hollow room, and set down in a kind of inquisition chair.”
The chair is equipped with a padlock, iron handles and leather straps. Johanna is so tightly tied up that she can not move anymore. When the 60-year-old lady from the stand receives a visit from a doctor the next morning, she realizes she has ended up in the crazy house Slijkinde. Her husband has just died and that has brought her into a crisis; exactly what she suffers is not known.
This is the story of the woman who turned the psychiatry upside down. Johanna Stuten was one of the first psychiatric patients to record her story. ‘My experiences in the mental institution in The Hague’ appeared in 1892 under her own name. That is special at a time when writing women were barely accepted and the taboo on mental illness was even greater than it is today.
Stuten is at the beginning of the patient movement in which experience stories have become increasingly important, says Floris Mulder, scientific assistant at the Dolhuys in Haarlem, the museum about the history of psychiatry. Today, every month a book with a title such as ‘How I overcome my depression’ appears.”
In an interview, Johanna said: “I may have to tolerate and suffer a lot, but I must and will speak”. Her witness about the practice of the 2nd Dutch Insanity Act of 27 April 1884 changed the Dutch Insanity Laws and the interpretation of them.
The Dutch Act “Wet bijzondere opnemingen psychiatrische ziekenhuizen” (Bopz, Act special hospitalization of psychiatric hospitals) lists the rights of clients during involuntary admission to a psychiatric institution, an institution for people with an intellectual disability or a nursing home for elderly people with dementia. The Bopz is valid until 1 January 2020.
She died September 26, 1898 in Ammerstol.