Louise Hide is the author of ‘Gender and class in English asylums: 1890-1914’. She describes the personal journey that made her a historian of the forgotten people of the ‘back wards’.
In the late 1970s, I threw my belongings – contained in all of two black plastic sacks – into the back of my battered Hillman Imp and set off to begin training as a Registered Mental Nurse (RMN) in a large psychiatric hospital in East Anglia. I had chosen this particular institution because of its progressive reputation. I was excited at the prospect of grappling with the complex ideas of Michel Foucault and the anti-psychiatry movement in the classroom. It seemed right that staff did not normally have to wear uniforms. And I soon found myself in admission wards where staff were falling over themselves to offer every form of therapy imaginable: music, drama and group therapy where nurses were encouraged to be as open about their own anxieties and emotions as patients. There was a feeling of being part of something new.
Until, that is, you ventured onto the ‘back wards’, where the majority of patients had been resident for years, if not decades. Here, men and women lived together on wards that were very broadly segregated according to the degree of care they needed: geriatric wards contained people at different stages of dementia; in long-stay wards for ‘chronic cases’ people shuffled around, their world dulled by Largactil. Some people were clearly very ill, others had been written off as ‘mentally handicapped’. Many appeared to be little more than shockingly institutionalised.
Sixty years on
I met women in their eighties who had lived in the institution for some 60 years. Connie was admitted aged 16 – uneducated, unmarried and pregnant. Bertha, who had grown up on a farm, developed early-onset Parkinson’s and was sent to the asylum because they didn’t know what else to do with her. And Dulcie was admitted because she was blind – 50 years later, she was experiencing severe psychotic hallucinations. We’ll never know what part the institution played in her mental deterioration.
These women haunted me for decades. I did not complete my RMN but I did eventually embark on a PhD researching early 20th century asylums to find out, among other things, why the ‘Connies’ and ‘Berthas’ and ‘Dulcies’ of the world were sent to institutions in the first place. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act was responsible for much of their misery, calling for the segregation of ‘mental defectives’ from society. For many, this meant sending or keeping people in institutions where, as I found in the late 1970s, they might languish for the rest of their lives.
My doctoral thesis forms the basis of a book that was published last year. Now, I am embarking on new research on the history of cultures of harm in ‘therapeutic’ spaces for people with learning difficulties and mental illnesses. This means looking at the ideologies behind the systems and practices in different institutions, from the massive Victorian asylums to smaller community establishments.
Understanding how behaviours change over time tells us a great deal about why systems of abuse continue today. Surely, when you read about the experiences of young men like Leslie Bonner, whose father wrote so movingly about his son’s experience in Winterbourne View in the April issue of Community Living (Volume 28, No. 3) this continues to be one of the most pressing issues of the day.
Gender and class in English asylums, 1890-1914. Louise Hide, Palgrave Macmillan 2014
Louise Hide is a social and cultural historian currently holding a two-year Birkbeck Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellowship at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a Founder and Director of the Birkbeck Trauma Project (www.bbk.ac.uk/trauma).
More information about Louise Hide can be found at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/post-doctoral-research-assistants/dr-louise-hide
