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of the asylum type practices were present in mental hospitals until well into the 1970s.94 The tide was beginning to turn, however. The 1960s witnessed the era of public inquiries into mental health care. Most of these inquiries were instigated by nurses writing letters to various prominent figures regarding patient care.95 One of these letters, which was published in The Times on 10 November 1963, was of significant importance and it was signed by ten individuals: We, the undersigned, have been shocked by the treatment of geriatric patients in certain mental
district asylum nurse in Ireland, and examine the manner in which both her representation, and the reality of her experience, altered throughout the nineteenth century. Male nurses, or ‘keepers’, are also a fascinating cohort but they did not fulfil the same gender-specific, nurturing brief. Their experiences are not the focus of this chapter although their work and contribution to mental health care is examined in chapters 1, and 3–11. This chapter draws upon the records of the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum (CDLA) in Ballinasloe, County Galway, one of the earliest
rule … shall be immediately dismissed.73 The wartime experience of the CCMH had thus redrawn the boundaries between female mental nurses and male patients in ways that exposed both to risks of stigma but also advanced a wider project to modernise mental health care. Crucial to the professional projects of reforming superintendents such as Goodall was the introduction of a feminine touch, albeit one embodied in the rather forbidding persona of the senior nurse who had survived both mental and general training and was equipped to manage both subordinate staff and
discharge of pauper lunatics from county asylums in mid- Victorian England: the case of Buckinghamshire’, in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective (Abingdon, 1999), pp. 93–112. 41 D. Wright, ‘The discharge of pauper lunatics’; A. Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkley and Los Angeles, 2006). 42 L. Westwood, ‘Avoiding the Asylum: Pioneering Work in Mental Health Care, 1890–1939’ (DPhil thesis, Sussex University
). But how do we get from these colonial and anti-colonial contexts to a global history of mental health care that incorporates post-colonial spaces and actors? This chapter offers a particular context within which to fill the gap between colonial and contemporary global health agendas in the history of psychiatry through an examination of the development of ‘modern’ mental health services in Nigeria between the 1950s and 1970s. In doing so I hope to de-emphasize the implicit binary that the existing historical narrative constructs between the
An edited copy of ‘On the Alleged Increase of Insanity in Ireland’, by Dr Thomas Draper, Resident Medical Superintendent, Enniscorthy District Asylum, XL (1894), 518–47; ‘Voices of doctors and officials’, in Pauline Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish: Historical Studies 1800–2010 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), 282. 32 Pauline Prior, ‘Overseeing the
. Suzuki, ‘The Politics and Ideology of Non-Restraint: the Case of the Hanwell Asylum’, Medical History, 39 (1995), 1–17. Returns relating to District Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, 1833 [695] xxxiv, p. 21. Cherry, Mental Health Care in Modern England, p. 101; Melling and Forsythe, The Politics of Madness, p. 56. DPH, CLA Minute Book, 21 October 1846. L. D. Smith, ‘Behind Closed Doors: Lunatic Asylum Keepers, 1800–1860’, Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988), 301–328, 307. Melling and Forsythe, The Politics of Madness, p. 57. For example, see DPH, CLA Minute Book, 9 January
. Russell, Who Experiences Discrimination in Ireland? Evidence from the QNHS Equality Modules (Dublin: ERSI, 2017). 11 N. Krieger, ‘Embodying inequality: a review of concepts, measures, and methods for studying health consequences of discrimination’, International Journal of Health Services , 29:2 (1999), 295–352. 12 Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, Submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Mental Health Care (Dublin: Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, 2017
sane?’ she asked one psychiatrist. ‘I don’t always’, he admitted. ‘I don’t think I should.’144 52 DESTIGMATISING MENTAL ILLNESS? Notes 1 R. Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London, 1999), p. 4. See also R. Porter, ‘Hearing the mad. Communication and excommunication’, in L. de Goei and J. Vijselaar (eds), Proceedings of the First European Congress on the History of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 338–52, and R. Porter (ed.), The Faber Book of Madness (London, 1991). Other influential works which focus on
. 122 The Mental Treatment Act was introduced in Northern Ireland in 1932, allowing a patient to admit themselves into a hospital voluntarily with a softening in stigmatised language. This practice matched the growing acceptance that early intervention with milder disorders could improve the mental condition of a patient. The Mental Treatment Act of 1945 was the equivalent significant step in improving mental health care in the Republic of Ireland which had replaced the erstwhile Irish Free State