Children of The Asylum - Feature for THE MAIL, 2022

 

St Brigid’s Hospital - Forgotten children of the Asylum 

The Forgotten children of the Asylum 

I grew up in a small town and while my parents worked I was more or less raised by my grandparents. They had spent their working lives as psychiatric nurses in St Brigid’s hospital, Ballinasloe, formerly the Connaught Lunatic Asylum. Once the largest mental hospital in Europe, our small town was shadowed by the imposing spread of it’s buildings, some of them dating back to 1833. My grandfather’s career spanned 40 years which wasn’t exceptional in the town. It was common to have mothers and daughters, father and sons all working alongside each other for decades. 

Growing up I heard many tales from ‘the big house’ and when I got older and started asking my grandparents questions, my mother became worried I'd have nightmares. I never experienced nightmares, but I did develop a deep curiosity and an inexplicable draw to the place that’s lasted my lifetime.

 In the 90’s I left for college in Dublin but would often make the journey home by bus for the weekend. The coach was elevated and as it passed the hospital I could finally see beyond the high walls. The sweep of the drive to the main doors, the elaborate iron gates, the symmetry of the cut limestone made the place seem inviting and eerily beautiful. But I knew even in my teens the dread and fear it held for so many. Recently I found a poem that I’d written as a teenager inspired by one visit home from college. I’d passed the hospital on the bus as usual but this one time I saw a young woman just sitting, staring out a window. I must have only seen her for a second but the vision is with me still - a haunted, lost and lonely looking soul. But just as the ebb of life distracts us all, I moved my focus, making a career for myself in Dublin and later London. St Brigid’s architecture, the fate of the patients, the stories from my grandparents, the fascination with the giant industrial machines decommissioned and medical treatments long discontinued all faded into the past until a few years ago when I started to read about the work of an amateur historian from Tuam called Catherine Corless. I was in awe at how this seemingly ordinary woman rewrote her local history, changing the narrative of the now infamous St Mary’s Mother and Baby home. By exposing the injustice and true horror, she gave support and closure to some of the people who were marred by what happened there. Her work made me want to explore some of the tales I had heard from ‘the mad house’ spanning back more than 40 years.

The story of Irish asylums has been well documented recently, as we grapple to understand out historic treatment of mental illness and try to find purpose for these empty listed buildings across the country. I set about understanding how these hospitals were funded, where the patients came from and how they were admitted and if there was any incentive to get them out. Was there truth in the stories of young girls ending up there simply because they got pregnant? Were babies born to patients and what happened to them? Was it true there was no age restriction on the children admitted? I wanted to shine a light on these stories forgotten by time and learn what I could of the children left to survive behind the walls of our asylums. 

In 1956, as recorded in Brendan Kelly's book Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland,  20,063 people were in public mental health hospitals across Ireland. That same year my small town of Ballinasloe had a population of just over 5,500 and at least 2,000 resident patients in St Brigid's Hospital. Despite these incredible numbers there’s strong evidence to show that Ireland didn’t in fact deserve the dubious accolade ‘The Mad Irish’ in that at no stage did Ireland have more new patients per capita than any other country. What caused the patient population to grow was the dependency of society on the industry of the hospitals. He writes “Virtually everyone was a stakeholder in the hospital in one way or another. The communities and families were powerful users and shapers of the system. Most committals were instigated by families rather than doctors or governmental agencies ” So what his detailed book tells us is we had a normal amount of patients getting in, but we had very few getting out. In Ireland, through most of the nineteenth century medical option wasn’t required for committal and many admissions were certified by justices of the peace, clergymen and courts. Doctors were frequently obliged to admit and ‘treat’ people who they didn’t believe were mentally ill at all. Our hospitals were full to the brim because to be discharged, the law was that your family had to agree to take you back. Sadly it was all too common for a family to refuse to take the family member home and often told the hospital, (many written letters exist in archive) that they only wanted to hear back when the family member had died. The conclusion of Kelly’s book is that ‘the Irish asylum system was a social creation as much as a mental one’. This was certainly true in my town as hundreds of families had parents who met and married while working in the hospital. My grandparents were no exceptions. They met and courted while they were both psychiatric nurses in the hospital back in the 1920s as did most of the couples in our area.

I gathered information and photos and in order to get others to share too, the obvious choice was to set up a Facebook page. I was acutely aware that some people ,ay have helped create the darkness that most certainly occurred behind the walls of all Irish institutions and some people spent decades doing all they could to help the patients. So respecting that both worlds co existed was crucial to moving forward with my research. There were no evil nuns running the show like in St Mary’s Tuam. St Brigid’s like many other mental hospitals was state run so as a society we can only look back and claim the past as our own. While looking at 1900’s problems with 2020 eyes is unfair to the people who truly cared for patients, the inhumanity that was shown in a lot of instances in the not so distant past is mind blowing. Interest in the facebook page grew and I even got a few requests asking about relatives who had been patients in Brigid’s - some as far a field as America. But most interest came from locals and past employees dismayed by the buildings current state of dereliction. People shared stories and photos expressing condemnation for the way the hospital has been left to rot.

Most of us could never understand what it felt like to be locked away for decades. We hear the word institutionalised but it’s impossible to truly understand what that could feel like. Brigid’s and many other mental hospitals experienced closure over the past decade and its proved detrimental to a lot of long term patients. Many couldn’t cope with the concept of change and sadly made their way to the local river and ended their lives there. I spoke to a nurse who worked in Brigid’s in its final couple of years and still visibly moved, she told me how patients had begged not to be moved. Some had been there over 40 years and felt they would have no chance of surviving elsewhere. Their entire community and family lay behind those walls. It was inconceivable and utterly terrifying to them to be moved on. But the hospital closed its doors in 2013 leaving behind hundreds of beds, stored kitchenware, countless pairs of curtains bellowing through broken windows, clocks and mirrors still hanging on the walls and most disturbingly, detailed patient records strewn on the floors throughout the buildings. These records held private details of patients who had been admitted as far back as the 1950’s. This year I decided to enter the derelict hospital to collect these records and offer a shred of dignity to the patients involved. 

Before Our Lady’s Hospital Ennis closed 20 years ago, a past employee Eddie Lough salvaged its extensive paper archives. Almost in identical fashion to Brigid’s, they were strewn haphazardly through the vast and damp basement and without his far-sighted intervention, much of the hospital’s archive would have disintegrated into the damp of the rotting hospital. Nothing had been done to record or preserve these documents so in 1995 he managed to preserve the records legally.  In his free time he sorted through the papers including minute books, committal forms, account books, and many other documents, some going back a century or more. He cleaned out a room within the grounds and put a sign on the door saying “Archive Room” which safeguarded the papers. I didn’t have the kind of time Lough had as the records in Brigid’s were fading by the day. Many were already destroyed by the seeping damp of the building and there was no safe room I could commandeer as the hospital was crumbling and vandals were stripping the site of anything vaguely valuable leaving it susceptible to even more flooding. I believed the papers and the black sacks of notebooks I found had to be taken out of the rotting building if we were to glean anything from them. I collected them up, double bagged them and wondered what Catherine Corless would think of my antics!

I was astounded at the amount of juvenile patients among the discarded records. At first glance I saw a girl of four, a boy of nine and young teenage boy of 15. In the 1970s I read of a six year old who came from a children’s home in Cork. I calculated he would be about my age now. It’s no secret that special needs or children with learning difficulties (LD) were sent to mental hospitals all around Ireland and St Brigid’s was no different. We have to have sympathy for women who may have already had several children only to have another who needed round the clock care. I’m sure some of those parents believed their child would have better care in an institution like Brigid’s. Of course many families simply didn’t want to care for a special needs child often feeling great shame and social pressure. Many families emigrated particularly to America and having a ‘problem’ child in the family was a massive hindrance. In fact it could mean refusal - so many were left into Brigid’s and places like it. Many people grew up never knowing they had siblings in the hospitals - and there are many cases of siblings finding out decades later that their sister or brother had spent their lives in a mental institution alone with no knowledge of them.  If they were lucky, they found out in time and were able to offer some comfort to their institutionalised sibling before their death. If they were unlucky, that patient lived their entire life believing they were alone in the world.

Sifting through the records one stood out among all I had read. Jude (I will change her name for this story) was born in the late 1950s and had come to Brigid’s at the age of four from the infamous St Mary’s Children’s home Tuam. According to her report she had displayed ‘behavioural issues’ and it was written that she was ‘tearing at her clothes and would scratch people with her nails’. The stark words ‘no known relative’ were clearly written on her report. Of course in the 1950s It wasn’t at all shocking to see children being put into institutions if they were blind, deaf, down syndrome or had deformities. Epilepsy was also very misunderstood and generally meant a life sentence behind institution walls. In the 1990’s there were still hundreds of Downs people in Brigid’s - most had been there from birth or early childhood. On that level Judes’ story was probably quite common, but coming from a mother and babies home if seemed odd to have ‘no known relative’. Surely the Bon Secours knew who her mother was. I worked out Jude would be in her 70s now and may have lived her whole life never meeting or knowing anything about her family. 

I put a call out on Facebook for anyone who may have worked in the hospital in particular the 1950s. I managed to find a wonderful lady who had been a nurse in St Brigid’s in the 1940s who met and chatted all about Brigid’s  ‘back in the day’. She actually remembered Jude and confirmed she was blind and wheelchair bound and she had no visitors in the decades she was there. ‘No known relative’ was the information the nurses were given. 

I managed to find Jude’s birth cert and learned her mothers name. Even though it was probably too late to help Jude directly, I gained comfort knowing she had relatives out there and a mother, who must have thought about her throughout her life. 

My elderly nurse also knew of the six year old boy from the Cork children’s home. “The hospital was over crowded when he arrived so he was put into a communal woman’s ward and essentially reared by the female patients.” His record mentioned ‘deformity’ but she rubbished that notion. “He was a wonderful boy and carved out a decent career for himself. He’s married with children of his own now and has come back to visit a local family who helped rear him’’ she told me with real pride. She told me she even tried to take him in herself but had a house full of her own children at the time of his admission. It was a comfort to hear of at least one child triumphing over a system that had disregarded him at such a young age and it certainly encouraged me to keep working through the thirty other records I managed to commandeer on my illicit trip to the asylum.

I heard there had been hundreds of files strewn around the floors some years back so I want to locate them and hope for another happy ending.

My attempts to give dignity to the children of the asylum is hardly on the scale of Catherine Corless’s work, but at least my efforts have ensured no one else can mindlessly sift through those children’s most personal details or worse, use their records to kindle the many dangerous fires being lit around the derelict hospital. Just as her diligent and painstaking work never set out to be a blame game, my quest to unravel the mix of local folklore and facts aims to help and heal. It can take decades to truly process and recognise the injustices of our past and to finally give these children some privacy feels like a small step towards peace for them and indeed for myself.

saracolohan1/medium.com