This book explores local medical, lay and legal negotiations with the asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland. It deepens our understanding of attitudes towards the mentally ill and institutional provision for the care and containment of people diagnosed as insane. Uniquely, it expands the analytical focus beyond asylums incorporating the impact that the Irish poor law, petty session courts and medical dispensaries had on the provision of services. It provides insights into life in asylums for patients and staff. The study uses Carlow asylum district – comprised of counties Wexford, Kildare, Kilkenny and Carlow in the southeast of Ireland – to explore the ‘place of the asylum’ in the period. This book will be useful for scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland, the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland, Irish studies and gender studies.

This book explores local medical, lay, and legal negotiations with the asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland. It deepens our understanding of attitudes towards the mentally ill and institutional provision for the care and containment of people diagnosed as insane. Uniquely, it expands the analytical focus beyond asylums incorporating the impact that the Irish poor law, petty session courts, and medical dispensaries had on the provision of services. It provides insights into life in asylums for patients and staff. The study uses Carlow asylum district – comprised of counties Wexford, Kildare, Kilkenny, and Carlow in the southeast of Ireland – to explore the "place of the asylum" in the period. This book will be useful for scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland, the history of psychiatry, and medicine in Britain and Ireland, Irish studies and gender studies.

Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland is a monumental work by one of Ireland’s leading psychiatrists, encompassing every psychiatric development from the Middle Ages to the present day, and examining the far-reaching social and political effects of Ireland’s troubled relationship with mental illness. From the “Glen of Lunatics”, said to cure the mentally ill, to the overcrowded asylums of later centuries – with more beds for the mentally ill than any other country in the world – Ireland has a complex, unsettled history in the practice of psychiatry. Kelly’s definitive work examines Ireland’s unique relationship with conceptions of mental ill health throughout the centuries, delving into each medical breakthrough and every misuse of authority – both political and domestic – for those deemed to be mentally ill. Through fascinating archival records, Kelly writes a crisp and accessible history, evaluating everything from individual case histories to the seismic effects of the First World War, and exploring the attitudes that guided treatments, spanning Brehon Law to the emerging emphasis on human rights. Hearing Voices is a marvel that affords incredible insight into Ireland’s social and medical history while providing powerful observations on our current treatment of mental ill health in Ireland.

This open access edited collection contributes a new dimension to the study of mental health and psychiatry in the twentieth century. It takes the present literature beyond the ‘asylum and after’ paradigm to explore the multitude of spaces that have been permeated by concerns about mental well-being and illness. The chapters in this volume consciously attempt to break down institutional walls and consider mental health through the lenses of institutions, policy, nomenclature, art, lived experience, and popular culture. The book adopts an international scope covering the historical experiences of Britain, Ireland, and North America. In accordance with this broad approach, contributions to the volume span academic fields such as history, arts, literary studies, sociology, and psychology, mirroring the diversity of the subject matter. This book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Disorder Contained is the first historical account of the complex relationship between prison discipline and mental breakdown in England and Ireland. Between 1840 and 1900 the expansion of the modern prison system coincided with increased rates of mental disorder among prisoners, exacerbated by the introduction of regimes of isolation, deprivation and hard labour. Drawing on a range of archival and printed sources, the authors explore the links between different prison regimes and mental distress, examining the challenges faced by prison medical officers dealing with mental disorder within a system that stressed discipline and punishment and prisoners' own experiences of mental illness. The book investigates medical officers' approaches to the identification, definition, management and categorisation of mental disorder in prisons, and varied, often gendered, responses to mental breakdown among inmates. The authors also reflect on the persistence of systems of punishment that often aggravate rather than alleviate mental illness in the criminal justice system up to the current day. This title is also available as Open Access.

This book facilitates a deeper understanding of the challenges of working with a range of specific source genres within imperial and colonial archives. Drawing material from a range of modern empires from the late 18th century to the present day, chapters consider the ways in which newer ways of thinking about the past have challenged more traditional views of ‘the archive’, provoking questions about what archives are and where their conceptual, geographical and chronological boundaries lie. Examining a wide selection of source material including government papers, censuses, petitions and case files, this book will be essential reading for students of imperial and colonial history.

This final volume in the Cambridge History of Ireland covers the period from the 1880s to the present. Based on the most recent and innovative scholarship and research, the many contributions from experts in their field offer detailed and fresh perspectives on key areas of Irish social, economic, religious, political, demographic, institutional and cultural history. By situating the Irish story, or stories - as for much of these decades two Irelands are in play - in a variety of contexts, Irish and Anglo-Irish, but also European, Atlantic and, latterly, global. The result is an insightful interpretation on the emergence and development of Ireland during these often turbulent decades. Copiously illustrated, with special features on images of the 'Troubles' and on Irish art and sculpture in the twentieth century, this volume will undoubtedly be hailed as a landmark publication by the most recent generation of historians of Ireland.