Security and Asylum: The Case of Hanna Greally

Eilis Ward

Issue 377, vol.95, Spring 2006

The fortunes of Hanna’s middle-class family waned, and she found herself doing nursing-training in London. Apparently traumatised by the Blitz, she returned home shattered – and ended up committed by her mother to St. Loman’s Hospital in Mullingar. Here she remained for nineteen years, until an enlightened administration in the 1960s saw fit to release her.

Even the best the hospital had to offer a patient – work in the admissions ward or in Prospect House or in sewing-room or laundry – entailed unremitting boredom. And insubordination would result in relegation to more punitive conditions, or in aversive medical procedures, or both.

Hanna’s first attempt at escape saw her immediately transferred to a more secure ward. When she complained of the noise here and sleeplessness, she found herself moved to what the patients called “No Hope Hold” – which was characterised by the use of padded cell, strait-jacket and drugs. On a separate occasion she was again banished to “No Hope Hold”: provoked by a nurse, she had lashed out and cut her hand on a window. That first escape-attempt set her up for insulin shock therapy; and she was released from “No Hope Hold” the second time only on agreeing to electro-convulsive therapy.

Adding to many patients’ sense of abandonment was the knowledge that they were considered well enough for their families to claim them back – an opportunity offered (mostly in vain) at regular intervals. Hanna could not persuade her mother to take her back; and when her mother died, the family pleaded inability to find a place for her.

According to sociologist Erving Goffman, jails, monasteries and mental hospitals can be “total institutions” : they secure total compliance by a systematic mortification of inmates’ sense of self (a compliance achieved through a total separation from the social arrangements of civil life necessary to recreate self-identity). And psychiatric hospitals in particular (he says) hold the diagnostic authority to label any given behaviour or attitude as further proof of instability. Not surprising…ever since 19^th century legislation in many part of the world linked insanity with criminality.

Eilis Ward lectures in the Department of Political Science and Sociology, NUI, Galway