MENTAL HEALTH

Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia nervosa was identified in a paper that Sir William Gull 1^st Bt. (1816-1890), who was the Queen's Physician, delivered in 1868. He believed that sufferers should be treated in hospitals and that their families should be kept at a distance from them.

In 1972 Professor Gerald Russell (1928-2018) of the Royal Free Hospital was treating a patient who had been diagnosed as having anorexia. He concluded that as she was of normal weight and had a healthy skin whatever she had did not meet the condition's criteria and it would be appropriate try to understand her condition more precisely. Over the next seven years he treated a further 30 people who presented in a similar manner. They admitted to being depressed and given to binge-eaten which they followed either by vomiting or administering strong laxatives. In 1979 Psychological Medicine published a paper in which he described a condition that he had dubbed bulimia nervosa. The bulimia element came from the fact that Russell had been raised by a Walloon mother who, whenever he had gorged himself, had accused him of boulime (bous (ox), limos (hunger)).

Russell moved to the Institute of Psychiatry where he developed the Maudsley Approach, which utilised family therapy to treat young anorectics who had not yet become chronically ill. One of the symptoms that enables the condition to be diagnosed is scaring on the knuckles. This derives from the sufferer causing himself to vomit by suppressing the back of the section of tongue between the mouth and throat with a couple of his fingers. When the response is triggered, the knuckles are forced against the upper teeth. This came to be termed Russell's sign. His principal contribution to the treatment of anorexia nervosa was to development family-based treatments. This contrasted with the prevailing approach of hospitalisation.

Russell and Arthur Crisp pioneered the perception of eating disorders as psychiatric conditions.

Bedlam

A sheriff of London believed that he had been guided to safety during the Crusades by the Star of Bethlehem. In 1247 he established Bethlehem Hospital. It is the oldest body in the world for the treatment of the mentally ill.

The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed some of Bedlam's buildings but left the hospital itself untouched. For once, the governors broke with their customary practice and convened on the site. They appreciated that, as an institution, Bedlam was in a state of deep crisis. Robert Hooke, as one of the three surveyors for the reconstruction of the City of London, designed a new building for a site in Moorfields. He used the Tuileries and the Louvre as models. This complex opened in 1676.

The hospital became one of the sights of London. Visitors could watch the inmates from a gallery. In 1814 the Hooke-designed Hospital was demolished. The following year Bedlam moved to a new purpose-built structure at St George's Fields in Lambeth.¹ Liverpool Street was constructed in 1829. It was an improvement of Old Bethlem, a lane that ran across the site of Bedlam.

King William IV (d.1837) visited Bedlam and was addressed by one of the inmates as Silly Billy . The nickname became attached to him and entered the language.

In 1926 the hospital was moved to Addington, Surrey. (The Lambeth building's two wings were demolished.)

Location: Liverpool Street Railway Station, Liverpool Street, EC2M 7PY. The site of Bedlam. (red, pink)

Lambeth Road, SE1 6HZ

¹. The central portion of the Southwark building forms the main block of the Imperial War Museum.

The Bethlem Museum of The Mind

Location: Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, BR3 3BX.

Website: https://museumofthemind.org.uk

Inmates

Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd (1817-1886) was a talented painter. In 1842 he and his patron went on a tour of the Middle East. In Egypt he engaged in a prolonged bout of smoking hookahs. He ended in a state of moderate confusion. This was ascribed to the drug. Sunstroke provided an alternative theory to account for his condition. However, it proved to be the onset of a schizophrenic that was to last for the rest of his life. Upon his return to England, he developed the belief that his actions were being controlled by Osiris the Egyptian god of the dead. In 1843, while under the delusion that his father was Osiris, he committed patricide. Dadd spent the remainder of his life in lunatic asylums. He continued to produce artistic work of a high standard. His mental condition was reflected in his paintings.

James Tilly Matthews

In 1793, during the French Revolution, James Tilly Matthews travelled to Paris, claiming to be acting as a representative of the British government. There he was imprisoned for a period before being expelled from the country. Upon his return he claimed to have learnt how to mesmerise people. He developed the belief that the ministry was secretly in league with the French regime. He started badgering politicians with this view. As a result, in 1797 he was incarcerated in Bedlam. There with time he became a father figure to many of his fellow inmates. The hospital apothecary, James Haslam, developed a strong liking of him. Matthews, during his time in Paris, had developed an interest in mesmerism. A description that the physician wrote of Tilly was one of the first descriptions of what was to be called paranoid schizophrenia. In Bedlam Tilly developed a belief that the strange thoughts he had were being created a machine, an air loom, that was being operated by a gang who were based close to the hospital. He was a talented draughtsman and drew up plans for a new hospital. Ultimately, some of his ideas were to be incorporated into the building that was constructed in Kennington.

Black Dog

The use of black dog to refer to depression may be derived from Celtic society.

See Also: WINSTON CHURCHILL

King George III

In the late 18^thC and early 19^thC there was a prohibition of the performance of King Lear because of King George III's madness.

Upon one occasion the monarch himself expressed a desire to read the play. His physicians concluded that exposure to it would not be good for him. However, they failed to realise that there was a version of it that had a happy ending in which both Lear and Cordelia survived had been included in The Dramatick Works of George Colman. After reading a copy, George was noted to be more agitated and confused . In 2021 it was reported that the book had been found in Kew Palace's library.

Website: www.hrp.org.uk/kew-palace/george-iii-the-mind-behind-the-myth

The Queen's Larder

Queen Charlotte rented a cellar beneath a pub on Queen Square to keep delicacies for her husband while he was being treated nearby by Dr Willis. Subsequently, the establishment was renamed The Queen's Larder.

Location: The Queen's Larder, 1 Queen Square, WC1N 3AR (orange, grey)

Website: www.queenslarder.co.uk

The MacNaughtan Rules

David MacNaughtan (d. 1865) had a psychosis that was fixated upon the Tories. He killed Edward Drummond because he was under the misapprehension that the man was Sir Robert Peel. The murderer was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Subsequently, the House of Lords asked the law lords to set out a set of regulations that could govern the handling of any future cases. The law lords responded with the MacNaughtan Rules.

It is an open question as to whether MacNaughtan would have been convicted had the Rules been current when he was tried.

Mad-Doctors

Henry Maudsley

In the 1870s Henry Maudsley argued that women had only a limited amount of energy and that if they directed their energy away from the bodies to their minds Britain would become a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race.

Melancholic Repetition

The novel Tristram Shandy (1767) reveals its author s, Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), wide reading. The book contains a section in which the text declares that we should not recycle the works of others. It derives from Richard Burton's (1577-1640) The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton had taken it from someone else.

The Melancholy of Comics

Dan Leno (1860-1904) was advised that he should go and watch himself.

The singer and voice artist Viv Stanshall (1943-1995) succeeded humourist Spike Milligan (1918-2002) in a bed in a psychiatric hospital. In the canteen the food server stated You won t be wanting greens! He replied that he did and asked that they might be heaped upon his plate. To this he received the firm response Mr Milligan did n t like greens!

Mencap

The National Association for Parents of Backward Children renamed itself the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. The organisation was founded by Judy Fryd in 1946.

In 1957 George Lee (1914-2008) became the Society's General-Secretary.

In the late 1950s the farceur Brian Rix became involved in the charity.

In 1963 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother agreed to act as the charity's patron.

The Education Act of 1970 gave people with learning disabilities the right to a state schooling.

Mencap started selling Christmas cards to raise funds. It did this with the assistance of Frank Ivory of Ivory Cards (later Webb Ivory).

In 1980 Lee stepped down as Mencap's General-Secretary.

Website: www.mencap.org.uk

Mental Deficiency Act

The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was informed by the eugenics movement. It divided the mentally unfit into idiots, imbeciles, the feeble-minded and moral defectives and sought to separate them from one another in colonies. The measure allowed women to be classified as moral imbeciles as well as mental ones.

In 1959 the Act was repealed.

The 3^rd Earl of Portsmouth

Location: 2 Hanover Square, W1S IJX (red, turquoise)

The Priory Hospital

The Priory Hospital is a private psychiatric hospital. It has a reputation for treating for treating celebrities. The building was constructed in 1811. In 1872 it started to be used as a hospital.

Location: Priory Lane, Roehampton, SW15 5JJ

Website: www.priorygroup.com

Brian Epstein

Brian Epstein had a number of periods of treatment in The Priory. For the launch of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) he hosted a party in his Belgravia home. He was discharged for the night and returned to Roehampton after his guests had left.

Location: 24 Chapel Street, SWIX 7BY (purple, yellow)

Private Madhouses

Warburton's White House

Those who were committed to Warburton's White House included Alexander Cruden (1701-1770), the compiler of Cruden's Concordance (1737). The incident appears have from his having tried to court the wealthy widow Mrs Payne, who at the time was also being courted by Robert Wightman. Cruden escaped and was declared at liberty by Lord Mayor Sir John Barnard. The writer then sued those whom he regarded as being responsible for his incarceration including Dr James Monro. The case was heard in the Court of Common Pleas. Cruden's suit failed.

In 1921 the White House was closed.

Location: Bethnal Green Library, Cambridge Heath Road, E2 0HL. The library building used to be one of Bethnal Green Asylum's male wing. (red, blue)

Pseudo-Science

Physiognomy

Physiognomy was a pseudo-science that believed that the human face could display a person s intellect and morality. The artist William Powell Frith (1819-1909) indulged in it when creating his great panoramas Life At The Seaside, Ramsgate Sands (1854), Derby Day (1858), and The Railway Station (1862).

Psychiatric Hospitals, Closed

Friern Barnet

The longest single corridor in Britain was in Colney Hatch psychiatric Hospital. Doctors used bicycle to ride along it. It was used by the movie director Stanley Kubrick in The Shining (1980).

There was a tunnel that ran from New Southgate Station into Colney Hatch Hospital to allow people to be admitted discretely.

The hospital closed in 1993.

Psychoanalysis

Sonia Araquistain

In 1945 Sonia Araquistain, the 24-year-old daughter of the exiled Republic Spanish Foreign Minister, committed suicide by jumping naked from the top of the family house in Bayswater. It was soon revealed that she had been reading the works of Freud avidly. Her inquest became a de facto trial of Freudianism.

Factions

The French tradition of psychoanalysis is different from the British one. The former is closer to Freud.

The Middle Group

Donald Winnicott was the doyen of the British Middle Group . His clients included the literary journalist Rosemary Dinnage.

Sigmund Freud

Location: 20 Maresfield Garden, NW3 5SX

Website: www.freud.org.uk

Ernest Jones

Ernest Jones became influential in Freud's circle because he was an effective fixer. His popularisation of Freud s work led the actor Laurence Olivier to consult him about how to portray some Shakespearean roles.

Jones wrote a three-volume biography of Freud that was loyal. Freud termed his acolyte a Welsh liar .

Location: 19 York Terrace East, NW1 4PT (purple, red)

Revolving Door Patients

John O'Donoughue was born in late 1950s and raised second-generation Irish in Leyton. Following his father's death, his mother suffered a mental collapse. As an adolescent, he was himself sectioned. For the next fifteen years he was a revolving door patient. The psychiatric hospitals that he spent time in included Friern Barnet, Clayburn, Banstead, and Whittington. When out of these, he would either squat or be homeless. He found life in broader society to be dangerous and sometimes violent. At the age of 29 he escaped the cycle by means of seeking to secure a formal education.

See Also: HOMELESSNESS

Samaritans

In 1935, while working as the assistant curate of St Giles in Lincoln, Chad Varah conducted his first funeral. It was for a thirteen-year-old girl who had killed herself because she had believed that she had contracted a venereal disease. In fact, what she had experienced was her first - and last - menstruation. The cleric determined that he would seek to help people to surmount ignorance and isolation.

In 1949 Varah was appointed to be the Vicar of St Paul s, Clapham Junction.¹ In 1953 a London newspaper published a story that that there were three suicides a day in the Greater London area. The same year the Worshipful Company of Grocers appointed the clergyman to the living of St Stephen Walbrook, the parish church of the Lord Mayor of the City of London.²

Being a City church, the parish required Varah to perform only light duties. This gave him the opportunity to establish a counselling service. He supported his family by means of his earnings from journalism and devoted his clerical stipend to the scheme. The livery company gave him its backing in this. In 1953 the Samaritans was launched in the crypt of St Stephen. Its phone number was Mansion House 9000. For the first decade, only clergy were appointed local directors.

In 1954 Varah concluded that the Samaritans should be a free-standing organisation. He also switched it from being a counselling service to being one that befriended people. This meant that a range of unqualified volunteers could be used. Subsequently, the body advertised that it was a service for the despairing as well as the suicidal. In 1956 the cleric secured a grant for the organisation that enabled him to start paying its core staff.

In 1959 the first branch outside London was established in Edinburgh. Four years later a Council of Management was initiated as a national organisation to oversee the 21 offshoots that were then operating. Subsequently, an international organisation was set up. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s the Samaritans underwent steady rapid growth in the number of its branch in Britain. Varah was a poor delegator. In 1974, following a members rebellion, he was removed as the director of the Samaritans Central London branch.

In 1986 Varah ended his ties with the organisation. His subsequent relations with it proved to be strained. In 1995 the Samaritans launched their single national number (0345-909090). Previously, there had been a series of local numbers. In 2003 Varah preached his final sermon at St Stephen's and retired as the Rector of St Stephen. At the time, he was the oldest incumbent in the Church of England. Two years later there was to be a rapprochement between him and the Samaritans.

Location: St Stephen's Church, Walbrook, EC4N 8BN

Website: www.samaritans.org

¹. From 1950 to 1961 he wrote for a number of children's comics that were published by the Rev. Marcus Morris. These included: Eagle, Girl, Robin, and Swift. He was one of the creators of the cartoon space hero Dan Dare.

². Each year, Varah would sit in the mayoral coach during the Lord Mayor's Procession.

Senility

The jazz singer and Miss Practical Moped columnist George Melly (1926-2007) was brought up by a mother who was both socially ambitious and very concerned about the opinions of other people. Fortunately, he also had a father who only wanted his children to be happy. As a young man, before Melly fils had established himself in the jazz world, he worked for the art dealer E.L.T. Mesens. He was involved in the organisation of the first exhibition of Surrealist art in the UK. In her later years his mother became senile. The son found himself savouring the way in which her conversation consisted of absurdist juxtapositions.

During his final years Mr Melly was himself afflicted with vascular dementia. However, he continued to be able to perform until a few months before his death.

See Also: ART DEALERS, DISAPPEARED

The Zito Trust

In December 1992 Jonathan Zito was stabbed to death by Christopher Clunis on a platform at Finsbury Park Underground Station. Mr Clunis had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic six years earlier. He had been discharged from a succession of mental hospitals and was not taking the medication that he had been prescribed for the management of his condition. In days prior to the murder, he had attacked at least two people. At the time of his death, Mr Zito had been married for three months.

Jayne Zito, who waas Zito's widow, and Michael Howlett set up The Zito Trust mental health campaigning charity.

In 2009 Jayne Zito announced she was going to wind up The Zito Trust. This was because she and her colleagues had concluded that the Mental Health Act of 2007 had established an appropriate treatment regime for people who had untreatable personality disorders.

Website: www.zitotrust.co.uk

David Backhouse 2024