Genealogy Chat

My great-great grandfather (who was originally born near Warrington and whose wife lived near Ormskirk in 1901 with their small daughter) died in Lancaster Lunatic Asylum in 1903 - the census records suggest he was admitted somewhere between 1891 and 1901.

His death certificate says that he died of an aneurysm and there was some problem with his aorta which he had had for "years unknown" - he was only 53, but I have since spoken to a relative of my neighbour whose father died of an aneurysm, too.

From what she described, her father's behaviour completely changed because of it and I wonder if this is why my great-great grandfather ended up in the lunatic asylum - when he died he had a small child and perhaps it was thought that his daughter would be upset or scared by his behaviour? Or perhaps his wife couldn't cope with looking after them both?

I doubt he was "mad", but his behaviour could have been interpreted that way 100 years ago.

On a different note, as someone said before, PMT was sometimes considered to make the sufferer "deranged" - an old medical book in our house described the symptoms of PMT in the sort of way that makes the woman with it sound mentally unhinged, and I think all they are actually describing is hormonal changes. But they probably didn't know that then.

In the 1970's I worked on a ward where there was a lovely old lady who had been put there when she was young because she had a child out of wedlock There was a younger one as well placed there for the same reason but a few times a year she went to a hospital for the mentally submormal to see her daughter who had been placed there as a child

Bren

While researching my family history there were was one couple that had 3 daughters with medical problems 2 were blind and one was a cripple. Their mother died and all 3 girls were admitted to an asylum. Can you imagine what it must have been like for those children after coming from a caring home and then put in a place like that. I understand that their father had to work and take care of the other children but it really upset me to find out what happened to these sisters. Irene

What an interesting and informative thread this is, I have read it through,I don't know much about the subject myself but find all your comments and stories fascinating, thanks everyone and Christine for starting it.
Gill

A husband could have his wife committed for voicing her own opinion, as Samantha said

............ but it could also be for refusing his requests to do things (in the house or ...), refusing marital relations, for PMT, for depression (after birth of a child or otherwise), or because of some made up story because he wanted control of her money or he was tired of her.


If the husband died, she was left to the tender mercies of her eldest son ........ and he might make up a story to get her committed because he didn't want to spend the money on her upkeep, or his wife didn't want m-i-l living with them, or mother was being stubborn and refusing to go live with son, or he wanted control of the part of the money/estate that husband might have left her.


Girls could be committed because of some minor mis-deed ............ tlaking to a boy on the stree, kissing a boy (as said earlier), family member wanted control of money left to the girl.



and ...... if they then protested their treatment while in the asylum, this was just taken as evidenc eof their "sickness"



It really was a very hard life for women and girls in those days.



sylvia

My great grandmother spent her last days as Storthes Hall Hospital (Incidentally, Margaret, it is near Farnley Tyas, on the outskirts of Huddersfield, rather than Bradford.

This was in 1919, just after WW1 She was 71, there was nothing wrong with her mentally, but we believe the reason she was sent there was that there was nowhere else in the area for her to go.

The family were never told anything and didn't really understand how she died. It was only after I ordered her death certificate that we found Cause of Death was Chronic Nephritis, in other words, Kidney Failure.

The Huddersfield University Halls of Residence are now located at the Storthes Hall site.

Another thought..did you know that 150 years ago a husband could have his wife committed to an asylum as long as he had a doctor's signature? This could be for the shallowest of reasons, for example she might voice her own opinion in a time when women were supposed to be meek and uneducated or question what he decided [remember men were in control in those days]. What a perfect way to get rid of an annoying wife or get your hands on her inheritance!! Read Wilkie Collins 'The Woman in White'. it is complete fiction apart from the fact that it shows how easy it was to commit someone to an asylum for the flimsiest of reasons!

Sadly mental illness does not stir up the same emotions as cancer say - everyone gives to cancer charities but people tend to shy away from mental illness even though it is estimated that one in four of us will suffer some sort of mental illness during our lifetime

If one reads some of the books written about the care delivered in the asylums especially in the years before they were closed and of course depending in what part of the country they lived many were in fact reasonable well treated, yes these may have been the acceptations. As Keith and others have pointed out the residents had their own shops, own grounds to walk around in (in fairly safe environments), many of the asylums/hospitals even grew their own food giving the residents the skills required to garden vegetables etc. It’s a shame that people we care for today still end up sitting in urine stained under clothing. I also worked in a nursing home and the level of care was excellent, there was none of that usual smell one get when they enter a nursing home. Recently it was sold and I returned to visit a few residents I once cared for I was ashamed of what I saw. As someone else pointed out many elderly care home do take resident requiring dementia care, but should in an ideal work be in a separate part of the home for the safety of those who are frail. It’s a shame that money could not be found to care both for the elderly and those who are physically and mentally ill. It used to really annoy me when people who had worked all their lives had to sell their homes to pay for their care.

I just want to say that my cousin's great grandmother was a nurse at a Lunatic Asylum in Essex from about 1880 to 1900, and the patients there probably had a lovely time, cos she was a caring and kindly nurse. We have a testimonial from the head of the asylum when she left to get married, stating her sympathy to the inmates. So I hope some of you got her in your asylums, or people like her.

They weren't all beasts.

Margaret

Keith and Ann I do agree taking people out of a place they know as home and putting them into the community is upsetting.
Thats why you see mental health people wandering the streets and causing problems because they no longer have someone to remind them to take the medication that helps them live a more normal life

Sorry Keith your brother is not getting the care he deserves. Im in NZ so cant speak for the care homes in England. I only know from the places I have worked that residents are not allowed to sit in urine all day. The incontinent or those who need help are toileted 2 hourly. They can also ring for assistance at any time and its given even though the staff are often rushed of their feet.
Most care workers I have met are caring and its not the wages that attract them to the work as here we are very poorly paid.Its dedication and knowing you are helping the elderly that counts.
I know sometimes care homes get bad press . There will always be those who are in it for the money as you say.
I would make your presence known at the care home as often as possible. Also to ring up the manager /owner if you have any concerns about your brothers care or those others if you feel there is neglect. You can report any neglect to aged concern and start the ball rolling if you dont want to get involved yourself.
Our elderly ones deserve better and so do our mentally ill.

One thing to point out is some residents dont come into the home until they are in their 90s. Having been cared for at home by family who could be in their 70s and not that well themselves.
We have to commend all family members husbands,wives.children who have looked after loved ones till it became too difficult and have had to resort to care homes.

A friend of mine had a sister in an asylum she was admitted because she was sitting on the front doorstep of a terraced cottage when a local coucillor walked past, no-one really knew what actually happened but he insisted the young girl had deliberately tripped him up so he arranged for her to be admitted to the local asylum.


Regarding care in the community my parents, then in their late 70s', lived next door to a mentally ill gentleman, he regularly went round late evening saying the aliens were coming and he must hide, Dad humoured him at the door until one night when he pushed past him and refused to leave for ages, then they used to get him banging on their windows
One day Mum was getting out of their car on their own drive when he jumped over the fence and attacked my mother, luckily neighbours and a passer-by grabed him.

When I phoned his social worker she accused my parents of lying and as I hadn't seen any attack I couldn't say it had occured. The Police knew and accepted Mum was attacked but she wouldn't.

Best of it was it was my parents who had called social services in the first place to look after him as they were concerned he wasn't looking after himself after his mother died.

In times passed there was very little expertise in mental health and those given the task to care for patients were badly equipped to deal with the task in hand. Whose to say that suppressing behaviour with alcohol is any different to using valium or largactil.

I know someone who is bipolar and is so grateful for the session of ECT that she had. She believes that without it she would have killed herself. It has left her with short term memory problems but she has learnt to live with it. She is on lithium and has led a relatively normal life for years.

The problem I have is with the people who were committed for the wrong reasons. When Leytonstone House closed in the early eighties a case was hhighlighted in the local paper of a resident who had been committed shortly after the war. She had not communicated since her arrival until one of the other patients received a Polish visitor.

It transpired that her Jewish family had somehow got her out of poland in the late 30's. She had worked as a maid in London. At the end of WW2 she received news from home that her entire family had been anhilated. She became deeply depressed and the family she worked for had her committed. (obviously she was expendable to them and no longer useful)

She had spent 35+ years in a mental hospital because no one had cared enough. It wasn't the hospitals fault, they had no background information and she had long since become institutionalised and would never have been able to survive in the outside world.

I often hope that her later years were spent in a home with people who cared for her.

As for all those who have contributed who work in the field of mental health, I take my hat off to you. You are a dedicated lot who deserve medals for your dedication. (As well as a decent salary!)

the sad fact is that we are all living longer and there will be more and more need for care homes as the years go by - something has to be done about it - care in the community as you say is a joke - lovely on paper but in reality a nightmare. The psychiatric hospital where I worked for nearly thirty years is due for closure shortly - existing patients are slowly being moved into the community. The majority of them have lived in the hosptal for years and although they are being moved to more modern premises it is an area they are not familiar with, there are no shops they can walk to and the main worry for me is will the local residents accept them or will they become the target of these feral gangs that seem to roam the streets these days. The hospital is in our village and has been here for over a hundred years - patients are accepted as an everyday part of life here but will they be so fortunate where they are going. I'd like to think so but doubt it very much.

Adding to Sarah's comments. I too worked in a care home for 27 years. Biggest problem was the ratio of staff to residents. The dementia patients needed more time and their behaviour could be very "difficult". It meant you had less time for the frail residents.
Eventually the dementia patients needed to be moved to a secure home/hospital that could provide better care for them and for the protection of the frail ones that were living in the same home
Government funding isnt usually enough as most of the care homes where I live are privately owned and the government will not pay the same rate for care as a private patient has to.
Sad really as many of our elderly are kept going with drugs but their quality of life just isnt there.
One resident who had all her mental faculties decided to stop taking her medication. She told me she couldnt walk to her toilet a few feet away without getting breathless and it was too hard for her. She did stop her medication and died 4 days later.
Sometimes keeping people alive on drugs isnt the kindest thing to do.
One family member living overseas who's mother had returned from hospital very low and expected not to live because of pneumonia insisted she be given antibiotics. This was done and she recovered. Sadly the mother had Alzheimers and the daughter overseas certainly didnt do her mother any favours.She wasnt there to witness how her mother was.
Having said that I dont agree with euthanasia but do think its a persons right to choose whether they want to continue with their medication

It is interesting to read all these comments and I agree with everyone. Many people who were put in the asylums should never have even got as far as the front door. However, I am a learning disability nurse and many of my clients/patients I care for today would have been placed in an asylum many years ago because their parents were unable to cope with them. Let’s just pause for a minute though, in the 1800s and before and up to fairly recently, we did not have the understanding of the conditions that we do today, we also did not have the skills and training of the carers we have today and most of all they did not have the drugs we have today, in order for my client group to control their conditions and lead reasonable normal lives. In the past the client group I care for were treated in the possible the best way that was know at the time YES it was cruel and should not have happened, but since the current thinking is care in the community and the closure of all the asylums many of the people who are in these asylums are in a way even more isolated now living in the community, it is also I believe a little know fact that many of the individuals that had lived in the asylums for almost all their lives, very quickly died when they had to live in the community. Today many young people with learning disabilities end up in prison - which is where I work as a LD nurse, as the services are not out there for them once they leave school. Who's to say that in 50 -100 years’ time people will be condemning us for the way we treated this client group today - just a thought.

I had sent for a certificate, dismayed to find he had ended his days in an asylum. but found out as I'd read on he was paralised, I presume a stroke, lived for a yr in there.
Thank god people who have a stroke today are not confined to the same fate.

Believe it or not I was almost ashamed to ask for help in my search to find details of my Gt Gran.First of all I didn`t know her proper name name only that she had died when my Grandfather was 8 in 1888. It was a load of codswallop she was put in a mental home at the age of 36 suffering from PM. after the death of my grandfather`s younger brother and didn`t die `Til she was 81!!!!! Can you imagine how horrified we all were. I have to say that we had lots of friendly help from the Devizes Archives, Wiltshire and have since been able to obtain all her notes etc.I am still searching for her roots as ofcourse the family seemed so embarrassed about it that noone really knew her background.Roll on monday, I hope to have her Birth Certificate at long last.
Jay

If you get the chance, but you do have to preorder, you can look at the asylum books from Bracebridge Heath Asylum in Lincoln Archives and they are amazing, they also smell clinical. People were put in for all sorts of reasons, one thought he was the King of England, Things which were quite normal part of married life, locked up for that. Autism, depression, blind, and the list goes on. It was quite facinating as i was looking for a relative who was arrested and i found the original record from the police in 1888. If you get the chance go and read them, it made me and my sister gasp at some of things, and wondered if we could possibly have a bed for the weekend, as we looked at some of the things you were put in there for lol.

My Grandfathers first wife died in an asylum. She had always been a bit "odd" She was bullied by her family and my Grandad felt sorry for her. He thought that he would be able to offer her a better life.

They married with her families blessings. However, despite my Grandads best efforts her behaviour became more and more erratic.

He would come home after work and find that they had moved. She would just dissappear to new rented accomodation taking all their belongings. Grandad would be left wandering the streets trying to find where she had moved to.

Eventually she became violent and my Grandad had to admit defeat and after much soul searching she was committed to Brentwood Mental Hospital.


This happened in the early '30's.Now asylums in those days were not pleasant places. There were very few drugs available to treat the inmates and I don't believe there were mental health nurses. Psychiatric care was in it's infancy and subsequently anything that made life easier for the staff was accepted. Alcohol was freely available to subdue the patients. There was also a great amount of sexual promiscuity. (A friend of my Mother's worked as a nurse at Brentwood in the '80's and promiscuity was still an enormous problem)

At some point my Grandad's wife contracted Syphilis and subsequently died from it in 1945. I can only hope that she had contracted it through a consentual relationship.

RIP Beatrice Alexandra Archer nee Waters 1909-1945