First off, I ADORE your title, "Personal Hygiene: a Route to Better Mental Health?"
Yeah, but what could he have done? They didn't have anti-psychotic meds back then. Jenny reads as schizophrenic. The only thing that you can do for a schizophrenic, even now, is medicate. That's it. And it's a permanent/for the duration of your lifetime thing
I agree. I think post partum psychosis is another possibility. I'm also relieved to not be the only one trying to diagnose the medical conditions on the show, hee hee.
I've wondered, too, how long Jenny was ill. The personality changes of schizophrenia can take months, even years, and it may not have been obvious to anybody that Jenny was mentally ill until she started having the delusions and hallucinations. I suppose it's possible that Jenny had symptoms even before Quentin left, but they went unnoticed, or ignored... She was becoming illogical?-- chalk it up to being another hysterical female. Maybe she started to become withdrawn after moving into Collinwood, but who can blame her in that dysfunctional household? And whom could she confide in, or seek sympathy from?-- her cold, supernatural sister-in-law who has designs on her husband? Perhaps she was becoming paranoid-- complaining that Judith and Edward and Grandmama and Laura were out to get her, or the servants were whispering behind her back, all of which was most likely true anyway. It could be that she already had a personality disorder when she married Quentin, and the symptoms were exacerbated by his leaving her. Add to that the stress of noticing that your SIL has also disappeared, throw in some pregnancy hormones, and you have a recipe for disaster.
The medical community did do a little better than nothing back then, however. Hypnosis was a treatment for schizophrenia. Psychoanalysis was very new and might've been helpful to her earlier on. She was about 30 years too early for chemical treatments, shock treatments, but thankfully also a frontal lobotomy. The biggest obstacle for Jenny is, I think, her sex, cuz women back were thought to not have the mental capacity of men. Grrrr!!!
The best she probably could have hoped for was to be housed in room that got some natural light that was clean and where she had some decent clothes. But even then . . . I mean, this is a woman who was definitely a danger to herself and others, so we're talking the bare minimum in furniture and amenities.
I agree that she was far better off at Collinwood than in an asylum, and that a change of clothes now and then and some assistance with grooming would've been nice, and if only the Collinses weren't so hell bent on making Jenny the
other family secret so they could've provided better accommodations than the tower room.