Mad Kings, Paper Houses, and an Asylum in Rural Ireland

Abstract

S This essay examines aspects of the local history and cultural life of St. Columba's Mental Hospital, a formerly large asylum in the west of Ireland. The way local people talk about the hospital as a place and the way the institution mixes its local, colonial, and national histories reveal that native spatial logics have succeeded in at least partially domesticating this bureaucratic structure, even as the asylum and the thinking that motivated it have contributed to historical changes at this periphery.

Global Side Effects: Counter-Clinics in Mental Health Care

“…In many places, psychiatric hospitals have all but disappeared-a double-edged success, since these institutions of confinement also stood, for some patients, as refuges from illness and from indifferent or punishing families and communities (Davis 2012;Pandolfo 2006;Pinto 2014;Saris 1996). While in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of western Europe-notably Italy and France-the process of deinstitutionalization began as early as the 1950s, when the welfare state still dominated ideologies of governance, in many areas of the global southincluding Brazil (Biehl 2005) and India (Ecks 2010;Pinto 2014), as well as Greece (Davis 2012)deinstitutionalization coincided with the broad neoliberal defunding of state health and social services in the 1980s and afterward, such that robust infrastructures for community-based care never had a real chance to be built.…”

Culture and History in the Halfway House: Ethnography, Tradition, and the Rural Middle Class in the West of Ireland

“…At the same time, Joe is also the dedicated employee of an originally British colonial institution, a large mental hospital, initially established as part of a broad wave of measures intended to discipline the Irish body and landscape towards recognizably civil (read ''British'') lines (Inglis 1991, Saris 1996, 1997, 1999. His sensibilities, while clearly rural and traditional in many respects, are also undeniably middle class, as everything from his modern bungalow to his local reputation as a ''progressive'' (i.e., marketoriented) farmer makes clear.…”

“…His sensibilities, while clearly rural and traditional in many respects, are also undeniably middle class, as everything from his modern bungalow to his local reputation as a ''progressive'' (i.e., marketoriented) farmer makes clear. At this level, we can read yet another instance of the influence of the mental hospital on local society (Saris 1994(Saris , 1996(Saris , 1997. In Joe's life history, for example, this influence has been the difference between a respectable local existence and an uncertain life as an emigrant.…”

The space of the nation: History, culture and a conflict in modern Ireland

“…The obscure, marginal history of the Abbey men; their sacrifice and negotiation, are issues interwoven with the texture of the Hydro-electric Dam. Understanding how this monumental development was culturally domesticated, and 'folded into the mold of local life' [49]. indicates how active human agency enables the production of nationality-by giving meaning to it.…”