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Asylum: Inside Grangegorman by Brendan Kelly [BOOK] - Picture 2 of 2

Grangegorman Histories: Inside the Asylum by Brendan Kelly (Paperback)

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In 1814, the Richmond Lunatic Asylum at Grangegorman in Dublin started an extraordinary programme of asylum building across Ireland, aimed at alleviating the suffering of people with mental illness who were homeless, in prison, or confined in appalling circumstances. By the mid-twentieth century, Ireland had proportionately more people in ‘mental hospitals’ than any other country in the world. On a given night, the number of people in Ireland’s psychiatric hospitals was more than double those in all our other institutions put together: prisons, laundries, mother and baby homes, industrial schools, orphanages. What was the life of a patient in an asylum really like?

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Grangegorman lay at the heart of Ireland's vast network of mental hospitals for two centuries. This book tells the stories of its patients - complicated stories of care, abandonment and the perils of institutional excess.Told in their own words, using documents, images and ephemera published for the first time with special permission of the HSE, this book will help the reader understand their stories. In the early 1900s, Ireland had more mental hospital beds than any other country in the world. Grangegorman District Asylum in Dublin stood firmly at the centre of this vast network of institutions. Founded as the Richmond Asylum in 1810 and ending its life as St Brendan's Hospital in 2013, Grangegorman epitomised and defined Ireland's mass institutionalisation of the mentally ill. What happened behind its walls? Who was in there? What was life in the asylum like? This book delves into the hospital's clinical archives to present the story of Ireland's forgotten institutions and the people who lived in them: the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, and those who simply did not fit in. The story of Grangegorman holds answers to key, unresolved questions in Irish institutional history. Why did we build so many asylums? Who was placed inside them? And what can Grangegorman tell us about Ireland's obsession with institutions in the past, and about mental healthcare in Ireland today?