The Bethlem Tapestry: World Mental Health Day 2010

A new exhibition is now open at the Bethlem Gallery, the result of a project led by artist Mark McGowan, and involving patients, staff, volunteers and carers at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Psychosis Unit. The tapestry, the culmination of a six month project initiated by Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Sukhi Shergill, has been created on ten metres of stretched silk. It is comprised of images and text made by the participants depicting experiences, thoughts and feelings in their daily lives over the period of the project and will be permanently installed on the ward for the long-term enjoyment of patients, visitors and staff.

Well-known London performance artist, Mark McGowan is a former patient of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Mark described the tapestry project as an opportunity to give something back to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, part of the South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM). “I was very ill and came to SLaM in a really bad state. As a patient I was given access to the arts facilities and never looked back.”

Since leaving the Bethlem, Mark went on to complete an art degree and now teaches at Chelsea & Camberwell Colleges of Art, having travelled the world through his art projects. The Bethlem Tapestry has proved popular with patients and staff. Ken, a patient on the Psychosis Unit, said the project made him feel happier and more relaxed, “Anyone was welcome to join in, we had something to do, something productive using the imagination.”

The exhibition coincides with World Mental Health Day on 10 October 2010: the Gallery and Museum will both be open on Saturday 9 October in celebration. Running since 1992, World Mental Health Day aims to promote greater public awareness and understanding of mental health and mental illness.

Exhibition open: 23rd September – 15th October 2010

Wed, Thurs, Friday, 11am – 6pm
(including Saturday 9th October 11am – 6pm, celebrating World Mental Health Day 2010)

For travel information, visit the Bethlem Gallery website.

Under the Dome: Open House London at the Imperial War Museum

The large green dome above the main façade of the Imperial War Museum has been one of the most distinctive features of the building since it was added to the Bethlem Royal Hospital during improvements completed in 1846. As part of Open House London last weekend, we ventured inside to see how much of nineteenth century Bethlem remained.

Now the dome is no longer the Imperial War Museum’s reading room (it has been transferred to the fully accessible new Explore History Centre), opportunities to visit are rare. However, 130 lucky visitors (and us!) made it up the three flights of stairs into the dome last Saturday, to hear about the history of the building and the Imperial War Museum from their Archive team, and browse some nineteenth century casebooks: records of patients who may well have attended services when the dome formed the Hospital’s chapel.

Evidence of the room’s former use (carefully restored following an arson attack in the 1960s) still remains, including the Ten Commandments displayed on the wall, above where the altar would have stood, and the gallery, which used to house the choir. The Hospital Chaplain was an important part of daily life at Bethlem; as well as providing religious and spiritual counsel for patients (and staff), he was also heavily involved in the programme of entertainments. Rev. Edward Geoffrey O’Donoghue (Chaplain from 1892 – 1930) organised fortnightly “Working Parties,” in which female patients were “encouraged to forget their own maladies in working for others.” He also wrote a history of the hospital, and gave regular lectures to staff and patients on the topic: over 700 lantern slides he used to illustrate his talks remain in the Archives, and can be accessed online. Why not go to our catalogue to see how much you can discover about life under the Dome?

Photograph of interior of hospital chapel at St George’s Fields, decorated for a festival, with Rev Geoffrey O’Donoghue, chaplain (1892-1930)

Getting into Georgian Bethlem 1

The restrictions on admission to and discharge from Bethlem Hospital in the eighteenth century often come as a surprise to first-time researchers. (So, incidentally, does the language in which these restrictions were expressed). ‘Mopes, Persons afflicted with the Palsy, or subject to Convulsive or Epileptic Fits, or such as are become weak through Age or long Illness are not proper Objects of this Charity,’ according to the Hospital’s printed admission regulations.

In other words, the Georgian Hospital wished to focus its therapeutic efforts on those patients it regarded as most amenable to recovery, and commonly discharged uncured those who had not recovered within a year of admission. For example, 60% of patients admitted between 1694 and 1718 stayed no longer than twelve months, and a further 16% stayed no longer than twenty-four.

To ameliorate the hardship sometimes caused by discharging patients uncured, the Hospital opened a new ward in the 1720s in which ‘incurable’ patients could remain. Those still unwell twelve months after admission were assessed as to whether they were ‘fit’ and ‘proper Objects’ for this ‘Charity’. Space in this ward was at a premium, however. The majority of uncured patients were judged ‘unfit’ upon discharge, and even the patients considered ‘fit Objects’ for transfer had to wait until a vacancy became available on the ‘incurable’ ward.

But here’s the thing: patients could not be admitted to the ‘incurable’ department directly; they arrived there only by internal transfer. So those considered incurable at the outset were not admitted at all. Here we see Georgian Bethlem striving hard to avoid becoming in reality what it was in uninformed popular imagination: a warehouse of human misery. Its primary strategy was to enforce its published strictures on entry. Admission petitions ‘will be laid before the Committee… who…will make an Order as soon as there is a Vacancy, for the Patient to be brought to be Viewed as Examined by them and the Physician, and to be then admitted, if [and only if] a proper Object’.

The published histories of the Hospital often turn attention to its famous (or infamous) patients. But in blog posts to follow, the Archivist will describe attempts to find places in Bethlem’s ‘incurable’ ward for two ‘ordinary’ people of the eighteenth century…attempts which, as we will see, soon ran into difficulty.

Georgian Bethlem, in Moorfields

Nineteenth Century Society: Women, Madness and Marriage 1

This short series looks at the very different experiences of several of Victorian Bethlem’s female patients regarding marriage. The diversity of these reminds us of how problematic it can be to make general assumptions about social expectations in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that some cases do indicate elements of the stereotypes commonly indicated by many feminist histories.

What might be of particular interest in an era in which online dating has received regular attention – both positive and negative – is those references found in the Bethlem casebooks to matrimonial agencies. For single women well past the usual marrying age, such as Mary Ann Swann, who was admitted to Bethlem in July 1895 as a voluntary boarder, social expectations could be difficult to deal with. Young people were expected to suffer from insanity following “love disappointments,” yet in fifty-year-old Swann’s case, her attitudes to marriage were seen as evidence of her mental illness. Mary Ann held the delusion “that she is persecuted by her sisters in order that they may keep her money … She is also erotic & desires to marry some man who will protect her from her sisters & brothers.” While her desire to marry in order to escape her perceived persecution could be regarded as quite a rational response to something she felt was very real, Mary Ann’s persistent desire to marry was instead regarded in Bethlem as a further delusion, related to her “erotic” nature: inappropriate behaviour in someone regarded as a confirmed spinster.

What was most problematic was Swann’s use of matrimonial agencies to effect her object: the Commissioners in Lunacy clearly regarded this as a dubious means of finding a suitor. After she was discharged well, in September 1895, Commissioner Mr Frene paid a visit to the Hospital, presumably instigated by the patient’s relatives, “to enquire how it was that this patient was at large as she was doing most extraordinary things & was shortly to be married to a man whom she had got to know through the Matrimonial News.” The Bethlem medical officers promptly arranged for Swann’s re-certification: presumably suspicion of such dating agencies was widespread. Mary Ann herself regarded her re-admission as a conspiracy on the part of her relatives, claiming that there was nothing extraordinary in her conduct. Yet, as Bethlem superintendent George Savage pointed out in his published writings, in the frequent absence of visible physical signs and symptoms the presence or absence of insanity had often to be determined by behaviour, regardless of the patient’s protestations. In the event, Mary Swann was discharged well after three months as a Bethlem patient.

In the Frame for September 2010

This month one of our museum volunteers has chosen to highlight not a painting in the Archives & Museum’s collections, but an envelope inscribed in black ink by William (or Lillian) Angus, a patient of Berkshire Mental Hospital in Wallingford. The envelope is addressed to ‘Central Board Visitor’ and dated, ‘21/6/46’.  Our volunteer writes:

“At first glance the envelope, like the six page letter inside it, appears to be a combination of word strings of unfathomable meaning and characters that are actually undecipherable – it is even difficult to say whether its author was named ‘Lillian’ or ‘William’.  Yet a sense of intense urgency and anxiety hangs over this communication. The words of the addressee were first written in pencil and then overwritten in ink, as was the ‘Strictly Personal’ stricture. The words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Bible’ also appear on the envelope, within sentences that may continue the account contained in the enclosed letter, or may constitute the writer’s afterthoughts once the letter had been sealed. In any event, the writer wanted there to be no mistake about the letter’s destination or the importance of its contents.

“The envelope (and enclosed letter) evokes an acute sense of organised necessity within a disorder that is otherwise apparently unrestrained. The presumed failure of the writer’s intentions gives it a poignancy which is almost unbearable. Did it ever reach its intended destination? If so, did its recipient take pains in attempting to read and understand it to match those of the writer in its composition? What response (if any) was made? We do not know. This item simply came into the Archives & Museum’s collections via Drs. Guttman and Maclay, the two Maudsley doctors responsible for mescaline experiments, the results of which are currently featured in the Bethlem Gallery’s Phantasmagoria exhibition [see blog post of 19 August 2010]. We cannot say how and why it came to them. Can we say, perhaps, that the intended communication has not utterly failed, given its continued survival and accessibility within our collections?”