Working Inside a Psychiatric Hospital in the 1970s

22 June 2023

By Lawrence Whyte

Up until I arrived at this place, I had not known a sense of community. The large satanic walls of the Victorian institution had provided my first experience of sanctuary. Scull called them ‘museums of madness’ and he was not far wrong. This isolated hamlet, which I chose to call ‘home’, was for most people a dark, disconsolate, dismal, draconian and terrifying location in which few would voluntarily commit their life to.

Before I found sanctuary, my life was in a state of drift. I later discovered that this was not unusual for many of those who worked there. We were a transient, nomadic sub-group. Almost hippies, but not quite committed to the full bohemian life-style. Characteristically we had all experienced difficulty with authority, whether it be parental or authoritarian. Our group were mainly young and idealistic and sensed that we did not ‘fit in’ with the conventional social order. Loosely we had little or no career ambition apart from avoiding what we considered to be the ‘mistakes’ of our parents. Although we were not aware of it, we were all searching for something but at the time we were not sure what it was.

In retrospect it is easy to pinpoint what we were seeking was some form of stability. Our institution gave us routine, tedious at time but predictable and certain. You cannot underestimate the price of certainty in post-adolescent years. The work was monotonous most of the days yet at the same time there was a sense of optimism and romanticism about it. We were working with and alongside people and they were a constant source of inspiration.

Concomitantly the work gave us identity. For the first time in our short lives, we were someone with a job title enshrined within an established pecking-order within an enterprise. We were independent of parental ties and could make independent decisions without having to account to our elders. The money, a salary no less, was important too. True, the pay was poor but the accommodation was cheap, food was plentiful and socially there were friendships to be made which would stand the test of time. That thing that Larkin said was invented in the 1960s was an available activity and pre-occupied our thoughts and actions for a great deal of our non-working time.

We did not call the place a community. This would have been too nebulous a concept for us to understand. There was a strong sense of solidarity and togetherness. When we encountered ‘outsiders’ who used pejorative terms to refer to it, we challenged their perceptions of ‘asylums’ and ‘loony bins. It was a hospital and its purpose was to treat people. We were humanitarians repairing the inhumane sins of our forebearers whose treatment in the past had attracted criticism from the neo-liberal elite. We were keen to stress that the ‘bad’ days had gone and we worked in a spirit of enlightenment.

If there were things that were missing, they did not concern the patients too much. We knew that something was not quite right but believed in the decency of what we were doing. Inequality had not become the buzzword it is today. Fundamentally we knew there were really two communities co-existing and mutually dependent on each other. We had all read Goffman’s Asylums yet we were trying to close the incongruent gap between the so-called ’inmates’ and the staff. Our sense of virtuous righteousness was resilient and durable. Our function was therapeutic and not custodial and woe-betide anyone who did not accept this. Nevertheless, the gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’ seemed to be fixed and impermeable.

Our cohesion was shattered by the headlines of a red-top paper one spring morning. It told us that the community we were living and working in was not one of benevolence or compassion. On the contrary it was an evil malevolence populated by cruel, heartless, and brutal people. The headlines were talking about us! Almost immediately the community split between the older guard who refuted the allegations and the younger group who realised the ‘something’ they previously could not grasp was the ‘thing’ that was missing. This was not a slow-motion collapse of morality but a car-crash.

Colleagues became suspicious of each other. Divisions were created overnight and defensiveness replaced any open-ness in conversations. Previously established relationships became taut or severed. We were confronted by the pressure to take sides. The morality of our everyday routines was being interrogated at a national level. Our saintly status was being replaced by a perception by others of villainy. Scrutiny and inspection were imposed. People who had not even visited our place of work became moral guardians and experts about how to fix our broken community. What had once been perceived as a place of affability evolved into hostility.

Over the past five decades there has been time to reflect back on this powerful, formative experience. Emotions are mixed. The sense of belonging and identity has never been wholly replaced. The reunions with former colleagues are still dominated by our feelings of confusion and naivety. We are still searching for understanding and seeking reconciliation with our past. In the midst of these sentiments, we still cling on to the notion that once we had lived and worked in a community that contributed to the people we are today.

Category: Modern 

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