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| Doris Hallas (right) died in Storthes Hall Hospital in 1974 following 23 years of enforced incarceration |
___________________________________________________
Asylum
Their
screams still echo through the years
Their sufferings
and bitter tears
Beyond the
gates, behind the walls
In shadowed antiseptic
halls
Clocks ticked
their desperate lives away
Till there
was nothing left to say
Nailed in
pine boxes later interred
Without
eulogy or holy word
In Thurstonland
just over the hill
And there my
friend they are buried still
Two thousand
souls or maybe more
The lost
ones in a nameless war.
At the going
down of the sun
And in the
morning
We will not
Resurrect
them.
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Remember that plaque that I noticed on a memorial stone in St Thomas's churchyard, Thurstonland? (See the previous post). It seems that around two thousand former hospital "patients" were buried in unmarked graves in the adjoining field. They had all been residents of nearby Storthes Hall Hospital - previously known as The West Riding Lunatic Asylum. Their names are now unknown and the authorities do not even know the exact number of people buried at Thurstonland.
The hospital was in operation from 1904 to 1992. Most of the buildings have been demolished and the site is now home to, amongst other things, accommodation blocks for university students. In relation to mental ill-health I guess that similar transformations in care provision have happened in other western countries. Now we no longer lock 'em up and try to forget about the sufferers. Nearly all big mental hospitals in Great Britain were razed to the ground late in the last century. And we no longer use the term "lunatic" to describe those whose mental ill-health has driven them into crises.
It was with all of this in mind that I created the poem - "Asylum".
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| The memorial stone in Thurstonland churchyard |
Everywhere way too many "lunatics" were locked up for all sorts of reasons, including here in Australia. But with the closing of all the homes, there is a percentage of people with mental illnesses that just can't cope, even with the stretched services that are provided. They are either homeless or in dodgy boarding houses where violence is prevalent. I think there is a place for a a small number of homes.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. Shelters with kindness and understanding. In England we replaced the mental hospitals with something quite vague called "Care In The Community". Trouble is the "Care" wasn't always there and neither was the "Community".
DeleteAwesome poem as it tells exactly what the situation was. Treatment was very limited and attitudes toward the mental health issues were completely disgusting. I'll never forget reading part of the education act for my admin course and they referred to imbeciles.
ReplyDeleteThese days we talk of "institutional racism" but back then there was "institutional cruelty". Thanks for contemplating this poem Red.
DeleteI don't know what it was like in the UK but here, it used to be that wives could be committed by their husbands. I imagine at least a few of those women were sane and inconvenient.
ReplyDeleteAs for the mentally ill, I am so thankful that I have never been hospitalized. I have a friend who has bipolar disorder and she is one of the strongest people I know. She keeps going, in spite of everything. We are sisters, not through blood but through love.
It is good that you are there for your friend Lily. Back in the day, hundreds of residents of British mental hospitals were women who had simply had babies out of wedlock or women who had suffered from severe post-natal depression. They need care and instead they got locked doors.
DeleteThat's an honest and touching poem, YP.
ReplyDeleteThank you Jenny. I am quite happy with it but maybe I should have let it simmer for a few days.
DeleteThat is a wonderful and sad poem. I've always hated to hear about the insane asylums of the past. They were so cruel and the patients never had a chance at proper treatment or understanding. Your poem is hauntingly beautiful.
ReplyDeleteInstinctively, I feel for those people - buried in the ground like nobodies.
DeleteA touching tribute to the poor patients (or should I say inmates) of the former asylum.
ReplyDeleteMental illness is such a complex and difficult topic, no easy one-size-fits-all solution is available. Medication and therapies have made much progress, but like someone else here said, there are still some around who can not cope on their own.
My niece suffers from borderline syndrome. If her parents and her boyfriend were not as helpful and understanding as they are, she would have to stay in an institution.
Sorry to hear about your niece Meike but how wonderful that she is lovingly supported.
Deleteautism runs through both sides of my family and many family members spent time in asylums , strange how times change
ReplyDeleteEvery community in England seemed to have a mental hospital close by. They are gone now but the tragedy of it all should not be forgotten. They were humans too.
DeleteYour post is very sad today, it brings to mind all those people who languished in these homes coping with their different visions of this world. The poem echoes misery, but is as it was at the time.
ReplyDeleteThere were two Victorian mental hospitals near where I lived in East Yorkshire. Austere campuses behind the trees. Who knew what went on in them? Thank you for reading this poem Thelma.
DeleteWe had a similar institution nearby (St Bernards's) when I was a child. It looked quite forbidding whenever we passed it on the bus. One of the threats we received for not being obedient chinas that we would be "sent to St Bernard's".
ReplyDeleteIf I had been told that, I might have thought they planned to feed me to a big dog - a St Bernard!
DeleteOnly just noticed that my stupid tablet had changed the word children to chinas(!!!) Why????
DeleteAnd there was me thinking that "chinas" was perhaps a cockney word for children - or something like that.
DeleteWhen I saw the word asylum I thought of asylum seekers and then I started to think how the word asylum is so different in the two contexts....only asylum really refers to protection of the vulnerable by the state.
ReplyDeleteSo, the ”protected" group has changed but the failure to protect is the same (at least in Australia)
I hope those people were buried with some dignity. At the very least I hope that some clergy officiated, not because I think clergy must officiated funerals but because I hope somebody cared that much
Two thousand people and that stone is the only monument. Like you I thought of the double meaning of the word "asylum". One meaning is so hopeful but the other is laced with pessimism and tears.
DeleteWow. what a well-written poem, YP. It breaks my heart to think of all those people who suffered in a twilight zone and were then left forgotten. It horrifies me too that many asylum inhabitants in the past were not mad but merely unmarried mothers. Thank goodness our views and values have changed over the last fifty years or so.
ReplyDeleteThank you ADDY...and I agree with you that in some ways we are more enlightened now.
DeleteI would like to add some local insight to the above post. My husband worked at Storthes Hall Hospital for almost 40 years. His mother had been a nursing sister and my mother a nurse there over two very different periods in history. My husband and I still live in the next village to Thurstonland.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure in the early part of the century when there was less knowledge about the causes and treatment of mental illness that there was indeed cruelty to the patients, but from 1960 when my husband was an occupational therapist there, things were very different. Yes, the patients were in dormitory style accommodation but many were permitted total freedom during the day to attend church, or walk in the neighbourhood, catch the bus into Huddersfield etc. They were taken by mini bus to places of interest by my husband and his team. He was in the occupational therapy department but also took his painting/craft materials onto the wards where some of the patients were not permitted to wander outside alone. The work of some of the patients was childlike but some of them made wonderful pottery and woodworking items.
There was a theatre where outside theatre groups came to put on musical shows and dances for the patients. At one point there was a gardening group and patients went willingly to work outdoors tending vegetables that were destined to be taken into the kitchens for cooking.
A friend of mine was a therapist specialising in helping patients to make cakes and even meals for themselves.
Eventually the powers that be deemed that this practice smacked of exploitation and so the gardening and cookery ceased to be.
The patients who are buried in Thurstonland all had relatives in either Huddersfield, Barnsley, Sheffield or Dewsbury areas and so they could have taken their relatives back to the area they came from for internment, but of course it was shameful for families to acknowledge that they had a relative in a mental hospital.
I remember it as a small well knit community and the patients were in a safe environment which was not the case by the 1980's when the large hospitals were closed down in favour of care in the community which did not work in the patients favour at all. They were seen wandering around our town centre just killing their time aimlessly. Many were put into small houses with a couple of staff members to make it more like a home environment but sadly they had lost a lot of their friends from the "big house" as they were scattered back into their own local authorities.
I could go on at length and I do know that it wasn't all quite so idilic. There is a book written by a lady called Ann Littlewood, who was a senior nursing officer there, and it has lots of photos and stories about the hospital from the 1900 up until its closure so if anyone wants an interesting read I'm sure it would be available on either Amazon or maybe even on line somewhere.
The whole hospital and its grounds are mostly derelict now except for the area where the student accommodation is and it looks so very sad to see it like this. The buildings, tennis courts and cricket field all gone to ruin.
The institutions did have much cruelty in the early days but once people understood more about mental illness then the asylum system wasn't so necessary as when people were much misunderstood and it was thought they should be incarcerated for everyone's good.
I hope that this gives a little perspective to what YP has experienced in a graveyard near by. I have many really good memories about the place from the last 60 years.
YP, the area around Thurstonland, Emley Moor and Farnley Tyas has some glorious walks. If you should ever take the train here again I could suggest some fantastic footpath walks that you would enjoy.
Regards B J Brook
Farnley Tyas is a splendid village. I have walked from there before to Castle Hill overlooking Huddersfield. But I mainly wanted to say thank you Beverley for providing a different perspective on Storthes Hall Hospital and therefore - by implication - on all "asylums" or psychiatric hospitals. I have no doubt that at the front line there were many kind people like your husband, your mother and mother-in-law - doing their best to deal with residents in a respectful, caring manner.
DeleteI used to visit a "home" in Derbyshire where most of the residents were old ladies whose reason for being there was that they had become pregnant when unmarried girls and chucked out of home. They then spent the rest of their lives in various institutions being labelled mentally ill. They were normal when they started the journey but, having had their babies taken from them, they became so institutionalised and no doubt depressed that eventually they were unlikely to be able to fend for themselves in the world outside of the hospital, having no qualifications for any kind of work.
ReplyDeleteThe home has closed and I don't know what became of the few remaining residents. It's hard to believe that normal people can be treated so cruelly by their own families that it ruined their lives. (And was a huge and unnecessary burden on the state.)
I have heard of that awful business before. Thank heavens we don't treat teenage mothers like that any more. The world still has many problems but in that particular zone we are more enlightened than we used to be.
DeleteI did nursing clinicals in a state hospital for the mentally ill in the early eighties. If things had improved greatly by then (and I was assured they had) then I can't even imagine the hell that it must have been before.
ReplyDeleteThat experience clearly left a mark on you Mary. It's not a working environment that would ever have appealed to me.
DeleteIt is always good to have another perspective (Beverley's post above). I don't remember ever being in a lunatic asylum. However I was in the homes for the elderly and infirm in the old workhouses. What struck me as a child was the sheer soullessness of the places with hundreds of people lined in chairs around the walls in cavernous rooms.
ReplyDeleteThey were passing time. Getting to the end of another day. Was that living? I agree with you about Beverley's excellent contribution.
DeleteSuch a poignant and thought provoking poem YP. It remains to be seen how the mentally ill are cared for in future, but hopefully with love and compassion. There will always be some who will be unable to cope alone and society should provide a caring life for them.
ReplyDeleteHere in Spain we frequently see people who obviously have difficulty in coping with everyday life - both mentally ill and those with deformities (sorry, I can't think of a gentler way to put it). They frequently come to the local cafés in the care of young people who show them such wonderful compassion. It's heart warming to see them enjoying themselves - to hear the laughter and see their smiling faces.
Thanks for your encouraging response to my poem CG. The fact that it caused you to reflect on mental ill health and debilitating conditions is reward enough.
DeleteThorsten's Land certainly seems to have caught your imagination. Beverley's post is very informative and your moving poem perhaps harks back to harsher times when women could indeed spend a lifetime in an institution simply for having an illegitimate child. My aunt, for all her working life a nurse, said that one of her first operating theatre memories in the early 1940s was of an attractive young girl with beautiful teeth and also what we would now term a learning disability, a patient at Rawcliffe Hall hospital, being brought into theatre to have them all extracted to stop her from biting people. On the other hand, I remember visiting De La Pole hospital around 1978 as a psychology student and being impressed with the caring environment there. I felt quite an affinity with one patient who could talk very knowledgably about his hobby, collecting geometry books. One further flippant comment about Storthes Hall when it was converted to student accommodation was that people said "no change of use there then".
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interesting input Tasker and for considering my poem. I guess and indeed hope that the 2000+ buried at Thorstonland were interred long before Storthes Hall Hospital shut its doors for good in 1992.
DeleteI read this early this morning. I've pondered it all day.
ReplyDeleteYour poem has stirred my soul. My mum spent long periods in mental institutions. As a child I was taken to see her. As an adult I went of my own volition. It was hard. Very hard. To see your mum in such a setting, see the vacant expression in her eyes, knowing she had undergone electric shock treatment.
I have revisited her today, through this poem.
She took her own life.
R.I.P. all the thousands and thousands who shared this terrible non life and death.
You have taken my breath away Christina and yet I feel gratified that my poem has stirred such private and rather painful memories. Love and hugs to you.
DeleteNeil x
Thank you. X
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