Time to think
With FL Paddy Byrne
FOR too long, mental illness has been stigmatised. Anyone who carries the cross of depression, anxiety and mental anguish lives in a fragile and dark place, a place that struggles to find meaning and, at times, even to remain alive. One in every three people will experience mental illness at some stage in their lives. In all our families and friendships, I’m sure we know and love someone who feels this vulnerability. To feel depressed is most difficult, but to suffer stigma as a result is deeply disturbing.
Behind the Walls, RTÉ’s documentary series on the history of our psychiatric hospitals, is another example of a very dark chapter in Irish society. Much attention focuses on Clonmel District Mental Hospital, as it was then. Today it is still open, and known as St Luke’s Psychiatric Hospital. A report written in 1958 by the assistant inspector of mental hospitals, Dr Ramsey, detailed a horror story of how we, as a nation, treated people living with mental illness.
The patient population of the “mental hospitals” in 1958 was more than 21,000 people. “For many years, Ireland had led the world in locking up its people in psychiatric hospitals. On a per capita basis, we were even ahead of the old Soviet Union”, said Mary Raftery, who produced the programme, depicting how Irish citizens were brutally treated in psychiatric hospitals. Huge numbers of people ended up in these institutions as a result of social problems.
Commenting on the experience of psychiatric patients in Clonmel, Raftery stated: “Unlike prisoners, they had no due process, no trial, no hearing, no appeal and no end to their sentences. Stripped of their basic human rights, they were consigned – often for decades – to conditions so bad that one official in the Department of Health said he ‘was thoroughly shocked by the abysmally low standards in Clonmel’.”
The first decade of the new millennium has, in many ways, been a painful one, from international terrorism to global financial crises and scandals within the Church, as well as in financial and government institutions. Much attention has been focused on revisiting and revealing a hidden and silent wound in the heart of so many places in our communities. This dreadful reality highlights how cruel and intolerant Irish society treated its most vulnerable citizens.
Fragile, decent people, imprisoned behind the high walls of stigma and social exclusion, is a shocking reality that many can still remember. Revisiting such cruel hardships is important. Healing can only take place when the truth is spoken, no matter how devastating and uncomfortable it may make us feel.
Walls have fallen, often broken down by brave and courageous people, who yearn for inclusion and renewal. Such a desire brings us all to a better place – the fall of communist Europe and, more recently, the ending of Gaddafi in Libya.
For all who are affected by mental illness in the past, I’m sure their story must be most difficult to tell or even remember. May the walls of fear and cruelty, wherever they are built, be challenged and taken down, brick by brick.
“When winter comes, can spring be far behind.”