In September 2013, the Halle Saint Pierre Gallery in Montmartre hosted an exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of the British magazine Raw Vision. Like galleries, the magazine is dedicated to Art Brut, a movement that insists on the artistic values ​​created by self-taught artists (including patients in psychiatric hospitals). I visited the exhibition by chance, and wandered around on a weekend in Paris, and found photos of tree roots made up of twisted and tortured bodies; Adam and Eve’s skins were peeled off to look like illustrations in a medical dictionary or butcher’s chart; a man Fish in his penis; exploded head; corpse trapped in the machine. I turned from these scenes to a set of images that didn’t look so scary: in the 1940s an artist named JJ Beegan roughly drew pictures of strange birds, mammals and fish on small rectangular paper. He was from the United Kingdom. A patient in a mental hospital.

Drawings by JJ Beegan, c. In 1946.

Most of the drawings were painstakingly completed with basic materials: the coke of a match burned on Izal medicinal toilet paper-this hard and shiny paper was common in British institutions throughout the 20th century. These images are curious creatures with human-like mouths, as well as human figures with side profiles. The other painting was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on a loose leaf in the Robert Louis Stevenson collection.

"These paintings were shown to me by a very sick person," the catalog entry reads, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first met JJ Beegan in 1946. Adamson explained that when they met, Beegan had been “locked out”. In the hospital ward for many years. He was incontinent in urination and could not speak clearly. He painted vigorously on the only piece of paper he could find. Adamson, who was responsible for introducing art therapy into the hospital, brought Biegun to his studio and gave him an easel, large sheets of paper and materials for him to use. Biegun began to fill the paper with pictures of people and animals, and wrote esoteric, intermittent thoughts, or perhaps information. "This man lives in his own world. He has made many similar pictures, covered with esoteric text, which obviously has personal meaning to him.

I was shocked by these naive photos, but what is even more shocking is that Biegen was a patient at Kurden Nessern Hospital, and in fact, I grew up there. This is an exaggeration: Netherne is where my mother works. My grandparents also worked before, and it is also a place where I spent a lot of time when I was young.

It’s weird to be able to imagine the rooms Beegan lived in—or, more accurately, because I never entered a locked ward when I was a kid, the corridors where he went from the ward to the art studio and back again. I clearly remember those corridors, I remember how I didn't like them. Shiny, dark institutional paint; double fire doors with plastic portholes; the windows are a bit too high to see outside—at least for me. I want to know what it looks like behind the locked door. I want to know what kind of matches can give you enough charcoal to make a small picture, and how Biegen got them.

When I returned to London, I checked Edward Adamson and his collection of art created in the Netherne for 35 years. A few months later, this brought me to an office in Lambeth, which belonged to David O'Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at Lambeth and Mozley Hospital and chairman of the Adamson Collection Trust. ). We walked around in the corridors of the clinic where he worked, looking at the patient photos displayed on the wall (these photos are copies of the originals, kept in the archives of the Wellcome Library in Euston). We discussed images and their different uses. Until the 1950s, works of art in mental hospitals were often used as diagnostic tools. Doctors and therapists will try to "interpret" symptoms, such as separation and phobias, from paintings and drawings; some hospitals are keen to try new treatment methods and try to let patients make "before" and "after" paintings to see if they are Any improvement can be found. But Biegun drew the picture himself.

Soon after arriving in Nethann in 1946, Adamson explained in his memoirs that he visited the locked "back" ward of the hospital:

Passing through the long corridor and many locked and relocked doors, I was led into a hall with about a hundred people... Many residents had undergone severe brain surgery, so many had their hair shaved. Others were wrapped in bandages and disfigured with bruises and dark eyes after surgery.

The patient was wearing clothing issued by the hospital and had no personal belongings. I want to know where Biegun put his picture. Under the mattress? In the work of Robert Louis Stevenson? Or does he always carry it with him? There is no record of the disease that afflicted him or the treatment he received. We only know that he and other scarred people were kept in a locked ward for many years. According to the "septicemia" theory of mental illness that prevailed in the 1920s, or he had undergone brain surgery, insulin coma treatment, or electroconvulsive treatment, he may have had his teeth removed, other organs, or all three may have been removed. He may have seizures due to the injection of injecting ditonazole. In the 1930s and 1940s, all of these therapies were common in hospitals and were used to treat many diseases such as schizophrenia and epilepsy.

A painting by JJ Beegan on the loose leaf of "The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson."

In the movie "Abandoned Objects" that traces the history of Adamson's collection, Martine Lusardy, curator of the Halle-Saint-Pierre Museum, described the feeling of dealing with these paintings:

This material is so unstable and fragile. There is a kind of humor in it. It is toilet paper...it is the most common and vulgar material...but suddenly you forget what it is, it becomes a piece of parchment, a precious object...the way people look at them has changed. It is no longer a clinical gaze, but [a] aesthetic and artistic gaze. The work changes the state, which changes the state and identity of the person who created it. They regained their place in humanity.

I like this emotion, but I'm not sure if I believe it. It would be nice to think that focusing on the aesthetic qualities of Beegan's paintings—rather than trying to diagnose him—will bring us closer to the person himself. But I don't believe this is what Art Brut did for Beegan. It is difficult to get rid of toilet paper, and the strange romance of a man in the most bleak environment continues to make images. I recently read about a man who spent 20 years in solitary confinement in a California prison. He used M&Ms and Skittles paint (dissolved in a little water) and a paintbrush with his own hair wrapped around a bucket. Plastic prison question pen. He described "cleaning the work area, mixing colors, priming, putting brushes and water in the milk carton or rinsing and starting the ritual aspects", I wonder if this is close to the kind of freedom at work. Beegan may have discovered this concentration when rubbing and scoring with a burning match. What I am looking for is to allow to believe that Beegan can indeed exist in "his own world". His esoteric writings are a sign of his secret life and are not completely obscured by the environment of imprisonment. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have hope that we can find a place for creative survival. It’s just that I suspect this will bring us closer to this person.

As Adamson said, some of the words on the drawings are esoteric. A painting is done on a large piece of paper (with a pencil) in an art studio, and includes the following set of words. I can't help but think that these words may be partly inspired by Stevenson. How long has that book been his only companion?

Waiting for [near/new] M page prompt M qu [enos] sedge country brid low [people ago dons]biaz be Queer oranges VIATI denture spur reer newtos dead in winter and autumn when we are him memo septuesguesim ALSORT Joel boy [eos/is] Galleon eh treasure island

But some words are very clear. There are two similar pictures drawn on toilet paper with burnt matchsticks. This picture must have been painted in a locked ward before he met Adamson. One is something similar to a medicine bottle, and the label says:

JJ BEEGAN sculptor DUNLOR ST BALLINASLOE

The other is his typical flat face, sitting on a triangular body, like a cone, drawn in a way that implies three dimensions. Both the bottle and the triangle figure are painted with the same "bracket" underneath-this helps to give them a three-dimensional appearance and mark them as works of art, as if they were drawings of independent sculptures. Below the human cone, he marked the following text:

JJ BEEGAN sculptor DUNLOP HILL BALLINASLOE

The narration of the movie that David and I watched on his NHS computer that day sounded familiar. I can't be sure, but it turned out to be writer Ian Sinclair. When we talked about the part of the movie where Sinclair described these images and read the script, I asked David to pause for a moment. "It's Ballinasloe," I said, "the last syllable has an accent. It's not Ballinasloe, it has an accent in the middle. Ballinasloe is a small town in Galway, famous for being one of the largest mental hospitals in Ireland. I am very Surprised that the name did not attract any attention from David—after all, he was a psychiatrist and was interested in the history of his field. But I caught myself. Why is the Ballinaslow Mental Hospital— It is now called St. Brigid's Hospital-is it only famous in Ireland? Many things that are famous in Ireland are only famous there.

But the voice-over is a bit harsh. Maybe it's just because Sinclair doesn't know how to pronounce Ballinasloe, but in my opinion, he or the directors of this movie like words that don't make sense. The esoteric writing and its private meaning suit them. What shocked me was that the clinical and aesthetic responses to the work were not as far apart as it seemed. They all invested heavily in secret ideas. But in my opinion, Biegun seems to be writing his name and address. With so much interest in these paintings, I wonder why no one has seen him.

After returning home that night, I searched the Internet for Dunlop Hill in Ballinasloe. "Dunlop Mountain is a mountain in Dunlop, East Ayrshire," Google told me, but it also asked: "Did you mean: Dunlop Mountain Ballinaslow?" I did it, or rather JJ Beegan did it. . When I turned to Irish census records, I could easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868 and the eldest son of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901, they lived with the young Beegans, Mary and Thomas at No. 23 Dunlow Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan Senior described himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as masons. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term "immortal stonemason"-the family were all skilled craftsmen, mainly engaged in cutting and carving tombstones. They do high-class, magnificent work and enjoy a good reputation; some of the early 20th century monuments in Kilbergley Cemetery near Roscommon County were signed by Biegen Masons. They carved a huge Celtic cross to commemorate the fourth Earl of Crankati, and erected it on his grave in Highgate Cemetery, just on the road where I live now.

By the 1911 census, John Beegan's eldest son, John Leo Beegan, was married and lived in another slightly larger house on Dunlo Hill— -A double-sided townhouse with its own stables, pig houses, chicken coops and other outbuildings. He listed his profession as a "sculptor". I also discovered that he married Mary Anne Beirne two years ago, and now they have a young son, also named John. Marianne is the eldest daughter of the local butcher, who is the neighbor of the Beghan in Dunlos Mountain. Biegan is married; the Bain family can afford three servants to live with them. The wedding was held in Rasmins, a middle class in the suburbs of Dublin. Either they have money and connections, or at least one of their parents disagrees with the marriage. They eloped and went home after the marriage was completed.

I can move on. I can tell you about the struggle between the skilled craftsmen and local farmers in Ballinaslow in the late 19th century, about the land that the Bigan rented in the quarry as their stone, and about the Bigan settling outside their home in Dunlos Mountain For more than fifty years, the megalithic stone is waiting to be carved into a monument to the Battle of Aughrim, about John Leo’s debt, and his running-in with William Hastings, the owner of the local newspaper. All of this and more can be seen in census reports, court records, and newspaper archives. I imagined something that I could not actually prove. I want to know if John Leo Bigan met another stonemason, Willie Pierce, who was about his age when he was in Dublin (for example, getting married, or helping to transport the Crankati Memorial to London). Pearse). Willie and his brother Patrick, the son of an immortal stonemason, were executed for participating in the Easter Uprising. Pierce’s church building and masonry business is located on Great Brunswick Street in central Dublin, behind Trinity College. But to dig a tunnel in that direction (political history, celebrities) is to find a refuge in a more familiar historical narrative. I am looking for evidence of other things.

I spent a few months in the world of the Robigan in Ballinas, or read the local history as deeply as possible, researched the politics of nearby estates, books on church buildings and the history of the asylum of Ballinas. . I contacted genealogists, local historians, and eventually even the surviving members of the family. During the lockdown in the spring of 2020, I took advantage of the government-approved exercise time to walk around Highgate Cemetery to see if I could peek at the Beegan Monument from a distance. I have always hoped to find clues to understand the exact identity of the Netherne person. I know he is not any of Dunlo Hill's obvious John Beegans—the ones I can find in the census—because they all died in Ballinaslow's home, not in the British mental hospital. For a while, I started to pay attention to the missing death registration. John Leo Beegan died of pneumonia in February 1922 at the age of 50, but his death was not registered until the passage of the Widow’s Pension Act in 1935. I want to know if John Leo (who lives in Dunlo Hill after all and described himself as a "sculptor" in the 1911 census) is in some kind of trouble and absconds. It was the period of the Irish Civil War, when social ties were often stretched to break. I planned a story to take him from Dublin to London and encountered more troubles. I have a theory about alcoholism and insanity, which put him in the Netherne shelter and imprisoned for a long time. I had no doubts about it until I found a report on John Leo's funeral in the newspaper in February 1922. No matter who JJ Beegan of Netherne is, it is not him.

But I really want to find him. I think if we want Beegan to regain a place among humans, we need to know who he is. But I did not find JJ Beegan. All I found were clues that didn't fully take me to where I wanted to go. In 1915, the Ballinaslow Workhouse had a record of the birth of a child named John Beegan. His mother Annie is unmarried. She seemed to return to her home on a farm near Ballinasloe at some point, where she lived until the 1960s, and remained single until her death. But what happened to her child? I can't find a record of his death in Ireland, but this may be because he died young. The deaths of children who died during infancy (especially children born out of wedlock in a workhouse) are usually not recorded. But if this child survives, will he be taken in by his relatives in Dengluoshan's Biegan? Does he work for them? Did he set off on his own when he was a teenager or young, and ended up unemployed in London? I imagined him as a young British man: Western Irish accent; little preparation for city life. At some point, he was taken away by the police and locked up. Is he homeless? Is he violent? At this point, I tried to understand more about JJ Beegan and there is almost no difference between storytelling.

And I can see that my obsession with finding the people behind the drawings is incompatible with the material-graffiti on toilet paper. I go back to the photos and see what stories they tell. The pictures are people, birds and animals. He wrote on a picture of two fishes: "BULLFISH SIMLER TA PERCH found in TH RIVER BARROW" and "FIKE [Pike] N AUGHRIM RIVER". The Barrow and Ogrim rivers are located in Wexford and Wicklow in southeastern Ireland. So maybe these photos just tell us that Biegun likes to fish-cattle fish's mouth has received special attention-and he went to some of the best fishing spots in Ireland. But I think the first thing the drawing shows is that this is a person who remembers. His painting is not an imaginary flight of another experience, nor is it a manifestation of his struggle with inner conflict: no person with skin peeled off, no body tortured. Painting is a way of memory. They are his connection with the outside world, the world he knew before he stopped his life and entered the mental hospital.

JJ Beegan lives his afterlife. The future was taken away by him, and he chose not to live in the present. He did not paint the people in the ward or the scenery outside the window; he drew what he remembered from his previous life. His photos are his only way of communication, perhaps including communicating with himself. He keeps writing his name and address on it-who he thinks he should be, or who he wants to be: JJ Beegan, sculptor, Dunlo Hill, Ballinasloe.

Netherne's case record is closed, so I don't know when JJ Beegan entered the hospital or why. But a friend suggested that I try the 1939 register-the British wartime population register including hospitals and prisons. It will at least give me a date of birth. Registration is easy to access online. There are nearly a thousand names on the list compiled by Netherne, and each patient is listed by surname, first name, date of birth, and gender. The list is arranged by ward rather than alphabetically, so it will take some time to check. I found that the name Beegan did not appear at all. This at least confirms what I suspect but don't want to admit: JJ Beegan may be another person entirely-someone who knows Ballinasloe and Beegans because he knows where they live. Maybe it's a worker, stone cutter, or neighbor who has worked for them for a while. This is a disappointing discovery, mainly because it means that there is almost no chance to figure out who the artist is called JJ Beegan.

But when I looked at the long, carefully engraved list of names, I was troubled by something else. The handwriting is very familiar. This list seems to be written by my father. My father's handwriting is neat and even. When I was young, I always got into trouble because of cursive stigma attempts. I can never get the nib at the right angle, and I dripped ink from the ink bottle all over the place: hands, face, clothes, and pieces of paper that should remain ink-free. I can't draw it either. Every night, when I was five or six years old, I had to draw a picture to represent the story we heard at school that day and put it in a quarter page of my workbook. The twelve lessons of Hercules; bread and fish; three wise men; Jason and Argonauts. I have been asked repeatedly to turn a story, along with all the twists and turns of its events and feelings, into something you can see in a square marked with a pencil on a page, which makes me very confused. My father is very pitiful, and often draws pictures for me and writes instructions below. I also have that little workbook, and the similarities between my father's handwriting and the Netherne register are incredible.

This is of course an illusion. In 1939, my father was 10 years old. But when I searched "Can handwriting be inherited?" on Google. I read various experiments that measure the similarity between different aspects of handwriting (direction, size, letter formation, etc.). And I learned that the incidence of genetic handwriting features (or in these experiments) is highest between father and son. As high as 98.3%. The register must have been made by my grandfather. This is very possible. My grandparents have lived and worked in Netherne since the mid-1920s, where my father was born. During my father’s infancy, my grandfather was a psychiatric hospital attendant, but by the late 1930s, he was already severely deaf (after undergoing surgical intervention to improve the deafness in one of his ears-incredible Yes-surgery on the wrong ear) and was hired as a hospital clerk. It is possible that during JJ Beegan's years in the Netherne, my grandfather turned the key to him. Maybe he did other things too. Maybe he is good to him, maybe he is not.

Recently, we took our 90-year-old father to see the house where he was born. This is a semi-detached house built for Netherne employees in the 1920s. It is difficult to see the passenger cars and four-wheel drive vehicles squeezing into the newly paved front yard, or after all the architectural improvements (porches, decks, viewing windows, roof extensions), to the narrow country lanes nearly a hundred years ago. But in the gap between the houses, you can see the Farthing Downs below. When I was a child, if I think of my father’s childhood (which is not common), it is painted in the colors of Bergerman’s poem "Croydon":

The boys are together in the Culston Woodland, thorny and steep, and he and his friends will look for the black parrot hidden in the depths.

We knew this poem in elementary school, and my own childhood was covered by its scenery, because I also live in Culston and went to the woods to pick blackberries with my sisters. There is an apple tree in our garden, so I know what Betjeman is telling the truth, when he said:'Pears and apples in Croydon's garden/buds and blossoms have fallen,/but your Uncle Dick has left his Croydon / once and for all. 'I don't think anyone pointed out to our children that this implies the end of World War I, anyway, in my understanding, Croydon is where you arrive or return, not disappear from there.

My mother came to Croydon from western Ireland in the late 1940s, where she met my father. They traveled early in their marriage and lived in some exotic places, but now they are back and we all live in Culston. An earlier generation, in the early 1920s, my father's father moved out of London and his mother moved out of the South Wales Valley to find work. They met in Cullden like my parents. Netherne Hospital is one of a series of large psychiatric hospitals hung around the neck of outer London like beads. They were built outside the city, on the highlands and on farmland, about the last quarter of the 19th century, to satisfy the growing number of “poor lunatics” who were the responsibility of counties and boroughs under the Victorian Poverty Law . Standing on a tall building in Netherne (there were nearly a thousand patients in 1922), you can see the Victorian water tower of Cane Hill Hospital in the north (about 2,000 patients), and to the east is the local name Caterham. When the year-old grandmother came from her South Wales village to work there as a caregiver, there were more than 2,000 mentally disabled hospitalized patients. Further east is the Psychiatric Hospital of the Borough of Croydon (later known as Warringham Park), which is a much smaller institution with only more than 600 beds, and in the mid-1920s, rehabilitation and admission The ratio is the highest in England and Wales. There is less than five miles between them.

My grandparents met at an air force dance party. In 1926, they married and lived in a room in the Netherne area for a while while waiting for the completion of the new cottage. They moved to their new home in 1928 or early 1929, shortly before the birth of my father, their second child. Before World War II, the social world of the hospital must be similar to the village that grew up around the manor in the early 19th century. Single employer, on-site accommodation, strict employment levels, from boiler furnace workers and farm workers at the bottom to doctors and medical supervisors at the top (it is not uncommon for hospitals to separate the dining facilities for nursing staff and cleaning staff, upstairs and downstairs until 1950s). The hospital is a self-sufficient community. Netherne has its own vegetable and dairy farm (labor provided by patients), bakery, kitchen, laundry room, carpentry and light workshop, printing press, church, library, cinema, dance hall, orchestra, choir, Sports facilities and amateur theater society. No wonder employees and employees get married, patients and patients get married, and sometimes employees and patients get married. Nearby Cane Hill also has a private fire station. In 1899, it had its own train station, and a covered walkway leads directly to the hospital. It is now called Coulsdon South and is located on the commuter line to London Bridge. In the 1920s and 1930s, the wards of these hospitals were locked, and the demobilized army was hired as attendants to control more unruly patients. These hospitals were between the country’s villages and prisons in the 1920s and 1930s. In the next two decades, they did not change much. In 1961, the sociologist Erving Goffman (Erving Goffman) described their American counterparts as a "comprehensive system."

When my mother arrived in Netherne for psychological care training in 1949, she took a route similar to that taken by Beegan. When she started working there, he might still be alive. It is possible that my mother was one of the nurses who took him from the locked ward to the studio and then returned along those unpleasant corridors. She remembered sending patients to Adamson in the studio and the way he asked them how they were feeling. I am almost certain that my mother's sister, Mary, has been working in Netherne since the end of the war. Biegan. However, she is extremely unlikely to notice him. He is just one of the hundreds of bruises and bandage patients living in the back ward, and they must get the best treatment.

"Any fool can turn a blind eye," Samuel Beckett said in Murphy (1938), part of the story of the novel takes place at the Belim Royal Hospital near Croydon. When Beckett's friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job as a family doctor there in 1935, the hospital recently moved to a new, well-ventilated location in Beckenham. Murphy bought herself a job as a psychiatric hospital attendant, and Beckett renamed it Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Murphy/Beckett is two years younger than my grandfather, when he was a waiter less than 10 miles away.

He will be asked to make the bed, move pallets, clean up often messy things, clean up occasional messy things, read thermometers, write charts, wash bedridden people, give medicine, eliminate the effects, warm the bedpan, reduce fever, boil saliva, disinfect. Suspicious, obedient to the male sister, waiting for the doctor to come with hands, feet, and mouth, with a pleasant look.

He will never ignore the fact that the patients he faces are not responsible for what they do or say.

In any case, he will not let himself be affected by the abuse, no matter how dirty and shameless it is, it will fall on him. Patients see so many nurses and rarely see doctors, so they take the former as their persecutors and the latter as their saviors.

He will not be rude to the patient in any way. Restraint and coercion are sometimes inevitable, but they must always be displayed with the utmost gentleness. After all, this is a seat of mercy. If he can't handle the patient alone without hurting him, let him call other nurses to help him...

He would never forget to shut up anyway. Mercyseat's mercy is private and confidential.

When renaming the hospital, Beckett loudly stated the similarities between British mental hospitals and Irish institutions such as the Magdalene House. It seems that no one is receiving the signal, so the sound may not be loud enough. But for Beckett, who traveled back and forth between England and Ireland in the 1930s, like half of the characters in his novels, the idea that these are two different worlds is obviously nonsense. They are the same world, arbitrarily divided into two jurisdictions.

Murphy looked for a job in the hospital because he wanted to test his hypothesis that life in isolation from others is a truly free life. The irony is obvious, because the nurses are described as "sadists" and beat them with the door closed at night, and the treatment the patients receive can either kill them or heal them. What Murphy wants to see is the inner mind buried in the institution; he thinks he will find salvation in communicating with the mentally ill. The facts proved that he was wrong. But when he only sees what he wants to see, he behaves like other people, including the entire community, who are good at turning a blind eye to their actions or denying the meaning of what they see.

Yes, Biegun sent me a message.

How do ward managers and nurses understand the afterlife in which their patients live? How do my grandparents, parents and aunts understand that they work in the hospital? What stories—about the pain they witnessed, the necessity of control, the value of surgery, and perhaps the nature of human nature—they must believe these stories to make their work bearable?

My childhood was immersed in the images and stories of the hospital. The year is divided into time periods defined by schools and hospitals (where my mother is still working) and "vacation" during holidays, when we are in Ireland. But they are two aspects of the same coin. My family was formed under the shadow of these British and Irish institutions. Although some people (including some of my family members) were sacrificed by the institutional care and deportation system, others (my grandparents, my aunt, my parents, and finally me) became beneficiaries of the system. We are both victims and perpetrators. But-this may be the core of what I want to achieve-I think it is mostly not like that. It mostly just feels like life.

My mother arrived in Netherne in the spring of 1949. She is 18 years old. I have a very clear visual image of her then, because she appeared in a movie in the hospital just over a year later. She only recently recalled this little adventure and found that she remembered nothing except the heroine who was a blonde. I spent weeks searching for actresses born in the 1920s and 1930s and checking their hair color. I entered various term combinations in the search engine: mental hospital, movie, 1950s, Sheila Hancock, Nethern, asylum, depression, Silvia Sims, etc., until one day I was in Searched in the BFI catalog and found this movie to watch online for free. When I saw the entrance of the hospital appear on my laptop screen, I was very satisfied with myself. "Out of True", released in 1951, was funded by the Crown Film Unit. As a public information film, it aims to demystify the mental hospital and let people know about the new development of NHS mental health care. The blonde actress turned out to be Jane Hylton, and one of the dark-haired actors was my mother.

The stills are from "Out of True" (1951).

Out of True is England's answer to The Snake Pit, a notorious 1948 film that accused the American Mental Hospital of treating mentally ill patients. This is a weird but true fact. The Snake Pit is the first movie my mother saw while traveling up town with her nurse colleague from Netherne. This must be shocking, and frankly, I am surprised that she once returned to the cinema. "This is entertainment?" According to Mary Jane Ward's semi-autobiographical description of her experience at Rockland State Hospital Olivia de Havilland (Olivia de Havilland) plays Virginia, a distraught woman who falls into a nightmare of asylum care until she is rescued by a psychiatrist with the knowledge of psychoanalysis. Much of the film focuses on a series of punitive treatments that Virginia suffers inexplicably, including hot baths and electric shocks, as well as brutal treatment of patients deemed troublesome or unable to help. A group of British psychiatric nurses worried that the hospital they worked in would be tainted by the terrible images of the US National Shelter, and tried to ban the film in the UK. They failed, and Out of True was a consequence of their failure-the official attempt to provide another positive picture for institutional psychiatric care in the UK. Therefore, my mother had a distant and unlikely contact with the world of left-leaning British artists and intellectuals.

Crown Film Unit has a group of radical talents to use. The script for this film was written by the poet and communist Montagu Slater, who wrote the script for Peter Grimes and collaborated with Auden to film John · John Grierson's documentaries, such as "Coal Face". Composer by Elizabeth Lutzens. She supplemented her income from creating orchestral and chamber music by composing scores for horror movies, and her melodrama skills also came in handy, especially in the Gothic opening scenes. Out of True has some sensational aspects, but they are all related to life outside, not in the hospital. Jane Hylton (Jane Hylton) plays a depressed housewife, pushed to the brink by—what is it? She lives in a small apartment with her husband and two children. The mother-in-law came to live and was overcrowded; she did not have time to be alone with her husband; she felt that she was judged by her mother-in-law (Mary Meral) and nosy neighbor (Beatrice Valli); one morning, She ran out of tea and accidentally turned on the gas. Perhaps these are not sufficient reasons to put herself in the Thames, which is why she was allowed to enter the Netherne.

She passed the hands of various kind and attentive experts. She was injected with a truth drug and underwent drug analysis to try to find the root cause of the problem. She experienced a benign and highly simplified electroconvulsive therapy, performed by an extremely calm nurse in a pulped uniform (the movie was cut out before the current was turned on). She engages in art therapy and physical exercise; she becomes friends with another patient, played by Muriel Pavlo, and her problem seems to be neurotic jealousy towards her sister; finally, she and the wise Dr. Bell (Jean Anderson (Played) had some Freudian psychotherapy. At the time, there was a true female Freudian analyst working in the Netherne, her name was Dr. Yates. Another self-help of her movie Jane diagnosed that the reason for her breakdown was the inadequate relationship between her childhood and her mother, and now she projects this relationship onto her mother-in-law.

Her treatment process was not completely smooth. One stormy night, she came out of the French windows of the open ward, ran across Kurden Woods, and returned to her apartment and her children. She firmly believes that she does not need to be hospitalized. But her reaction to the sirens in the distance proved that her nerves were still injured, and her husband rode her back to the safety of the institution on a motorcycle. This derailment taught her to believe in experts. This movie has brought many lessons to the audience. It is wrong to be afraid of the mentally ill. They are just like you and me, especially for neurotic women, especially if you and I are both women. The film also teaches that if you are one of those neurotic women, it is wrong to be afraid of mental hospitals. No one is locked up in the movie, no one poses a threat to anyone other than himself, and food and lodging are good.

Netherne is indeed known for its civilized and humane treatment of patients. The hospital was chosen as the background of the movie may not be accidental. In 1947, Eric Cunningham Dax, the medical director of the hospital, published "Modern Psychotherapy", a nurse's manual detailing the latest treatments. For example, a chart showing how to arrange the instruments used to manage insulin is similar to the storyboard of the treatment shot in Out of True. The whole thing exudes clinical authority and a commitment to the sanitary control of mental illness. I imagined my teenage mother, wearing a paste uniform, learning to practice. In fact, it is easy to take a picture of her because I can find a picture on the Internet. The person in the picture is very similar to the picture of her recording insulin coma patients in Netherne. The picture is from an archive in the early 1950s. Netherne is known for creating a benign and enlightened disease environment. There are locked wards, tights and padded cells, but "senior" patients are allowed as much freedom as possible. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited and praised the benefits of its progressive system in 1948, the hospital became an international showcase, compared to the harsh conditions in shelters in American states.

About 24 minutes after the film, my mother appeared. She is lying on the grass outside one of the wards reading a book. She wore a gorgeous dress, and behind her was Surrey Hills, stretching all the way to the horizon. She seems to be a resident of Netherne; next to her is another patient, flipping through a magazine. This is a peaceful scene, obviously a bit richer. In the foreground, Muriel Pavlow explained to Jane Hylton that she was among the best in the girls' school class. The point seems to be that people of all backgrounds get sick, and mental illness has nothing to do with the brain or bank balance. (A few years later, in order to prove this, Vivien Leigh was sent to Netherne after a malfunction during the filming of "Elephant Walk." Her treatment included being placed in an insulin-induced coma for several weeks during which two Sisters—real sisters, Maureen and Catherine Barrett from Galway, one of them works day shift and the other works night shift—she is lying on a mattress on the floor.)

At the end of the scene, Jane and Muriel were called for tea. When they came back from the French windows, my mother looked up at them from the book. It lasted for a second, and her head moved. I watched it over and over again. I adjusted the film to half speed. I tried to slow down her movements by observing slowly and holding my breath. Before I met her, I was watching my mother, moving on my laptop screen at my daughter's current age.

My mother was a voluntary patient in her spare time: What fascinated me about this mountaintop scene was the way it pointed so directly to the fault line through the new look of the mental hospital in the 1950s. The day-to-day operation of a hospital, like a prison, depends on the clear distinction between the staff and the prisoners—the powerful and those at their disposal. However, as the purpose of the post-war hospital changed, from the initial monitoring to the goal of treatment and cure, they became more and more convinced that the role could be changed. Unless you admit that the difference between the people inside and the people outside is small, unlocking the ward is meaningless. Prisoners can and ideally should make enough progress to return to civilian life (as Hayton did in the movie). But for the same reason, the staff may regress and become prisoners. The woman in the floral dress and her companion reading the magazine in the background are not patients, but nurses. However, if you don't know it yet, it is impossible to tell the difference.

My mother remembers the day she was photographed as a patient. When she was asked by her sister in charge if she wanted to star in a movie, she spent a very junior assistant in the operating room (delivering instruments? Calculating swabs?). "Quickly change your uniform, and then ran to the cafeteria where they were looking for extras." I want to know, what happened in the operating room? In the early days of the hospital, it may be used to remove the patient’s teeth, or it may be used to remove the tonsils, testes, ovaries, gallbladder, cervix and part of the colon. Under the influence of the experimental work of the American psychiatrist Henry Cotton (Henry Cotton), surgical treatment of mental illness was very popular in the 1920s. He believed that mental illness was caused by "focal sepsis", which was caused by a physical infection. The result of treatment.

The stills are from "Out of True" (1951).

By the early 1940s, theories about the biological causes of mental illness had shifted attention from organs to the brain, and the operating room was replaced by neurosurgical interventions, especially leukotomy (or lobectomy). Charismatic neurosurgeon Wylie McKissock is based at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Queens Square and Wimbledon, London, and appears every six months or so and performs leukotomy on patients selected by psychiatrists. One of his junior colleagues recalled, “He was ready to go to any place in the hospital on Saturday morning for three or four leukotomy, and then drive away again.” My mother remembered his excitement when he arrived because The nurses ran and glanced at him. He drove to psychiatric hospitals across the country, and by 1957, he claimed to have performed 490 surgical operations using his new "Mouth P" technique (except for those performed using standard procedures), which he claimed took 6 minutes to complete . He explained, "For experienced neurosurgeons, this is a very simple technique that does not require specialized instruments or equipment and can be performed in the simplest form of operating room."

You can watch a fairly confident expert (almost improvisation) explaining this technique in the BBC series The Hurt Mind on YouTube. The series aired five episodes in the spring of 1957. In the mid-1950s, almost half of the hospital beds in the UK were occupied by patients with mental illness, but few people talked about mental illness. If you want to convince people that psychiatry is a respected field of medicine, then you must do something about this stigma. The National Mental Health Association has collaborated with the BBC to produce a series of designs, as the introduction says:

1. Eliminate fear. 2. Encourage patients to use existing treatment methods in the early stages of the disease. 3. Promote the latest developments in medical science and increase public confidence in modern medicine.

This is propaganda, although this is not all. Watching these programs now, anyone can take these doctors and their pets treatment seriously, which seems extraordinary. Gorgeous voices, suits, cheesy brain diagrams with arrows indicating the location of the incision, boxes with electric shock switches, which look like a basic car battery, and nervous patients and their families prompt them to give clear advice on their treatment The answer ("Oh yes, sir, he is as good now as before"). It faltered on the edge of the imitation, and the python didn't laugh. The crack must be visible at that time. In the first episode, Congressman and broadcaster Christopher Mayhew went to Warringham Park Hospital (from the hills of Netherne) to examine himself to show the audience away from the pain and violence of despair , Violent, weird and weird behavior.” The ward has a warm fireside, TV, visiting barber and morning newspaper in the lounge, just like a “hotel or a private hotel”. However, on the other side of Netherne, on Cane Hill, Mayhew admits that it is "ugly, depressing, pathetic... you feel like you are in a 19th century prison or workhouse... Shortage and overcrowding means that doors and gates are locked. ——This can only be done by diligent employees. This door locks patients in this practice field, or so-called ventilated court. It has no sunlight, is crowded, and ugly, just like a cage for wild animals.

The purpose of showing prisons and cages is to understand the need for new treatments. It was not until 1954 that psychotropic drugs, especially chlorpromazine (sold under the name of Largeactil) were widely used. Prior to this, the main methods of treating mental illness in the UK were insulin coma, ECT and leukotomy. If you want to get rid of a purely imprisonment system (tight clothing, padded cells, a dose of metaldehyde that keeps people asleep), you must work hard to prove that the new treatment works. Individual heads of hospitals across the country conducted their own small-scale experiments, and Netherne's experiments have been very detailed records. Once you start studying these studies, it is difficult to know where to stop. I can read about Eric Cunningham Dax's experiment with ammonium chloride to induce convulsions, and his views on the relative benefits of frontal vertical and horizontal incisions. I can study his description of selecting 50 patients for leukotomy in 1942, almost based on their level of nuisance. "They constitute a large part of the most violent, hostile, noisiest, most exciting, most destructive, or most obscene cases in the hospital; the kind that makes their relatives miserable, makes other patients feel uneasy and consumes staff The type of time and energy that can better achieve the goal. I am reminded of the ward where JJ Beegan lived in those years. Two patients in the trial died, but apparently the others became more docile.

I discovered that insulin therapy was the expertise of RK Freudenberg in Berlin (until he escaped in 1935) and Vienna (until he escaped in 1937), and he eventually brought his expertise to Netherne. I can see this kind of treatment by Netherne's nurses in the third episode of The Hurt Mind. No one mentions the death rate, and the fact that there is no evidence to prove its effectiveness. I can learn about Freudenberg’s growing disillusionment with physical therapy, pioneering research on “industrial therapy” for long-term hospitalized patients in Netherne, and a pilot program to determine whether small-scale treatment communities can be created in large psychiatric hospitals. In 1957, Freudenberg attended the Medical Supervisor Course, where he worked with some of the UK's most innovative therapeutic community advocates and opened the door: Maxwell Jones, Duncan Macmillan, David Clark. He returned to the hospital with some excitement. By the mid-1950s, Netherne had a resident sociologist who was responsible for researching social behavior in the hospital. Then there are all the materials for the work of art therapist Edward Adamson, and his extensive collection of patient art. The hospital is the dream of a historian, and it is well documented. Of course, the prize was that Netherne was described as Hospital A (the “best” hospital) in a major study on “institutionalism and schizophrenia” for most of the 1960s. There is an entire book with Netherne as the central character. I have read all of this, hoping to better understand what people thought of hospitals and treatment fifty or sixty years ago. But all I really got out of it was the speed at which they changed their minds.

I searched for a detail in the anonymous case history that will tell me how it feels to be the subject of these studies and experiments. The patient flew around the pages of the book like a ghost. What embarrassed me was that I couldn't get rid of the mental images of animals glimpsed in the wild—the strange sightings of patients in these official studies are like the flashes of life in the alien habitat. But considering that these patients are almost (or have been) imprisoned, this metaphor seems obscene. A zoo or a circus may be more suitable. They are over-observed, recorded and recorded, but their inner life seems unable to capture. For example, Georgia N. participated in a large-scale study of the rehabilitation of patients with schizophrenia in the early 1960s. She “was hospitalized for a few months in 1949, when she had a leukotomy, and then was admitted to the hospital again in 1950 when she was 39 years old. She is said to have a “persecution complex” and heard comments in “the other seven languages” and at least self-confidence. She has been ill since 1943. In 1964, she barely changed, but “her appearance is still smart and charming.” Or Dorothy Q., who was admitted in 1952 at the age of 40 when she was described as “ Domineering, grumpy, and controversial.” She complained vaguely about various physical influences and used bread and tea for a living to control them. She was untidy and withdrawn, thinking that everyone nearby was against her. Twelve years later, "She still complains a lot and is very suspicious of every question raised. The pressure of the conversation is small and the content is small. These women are obviously very sick and have bad tempers, but it is difficult to imagine that accepting strict classification and quantitative research tools (behavioral index and social withdrawal score) will make them better.

One Netherne trial involved having patients fold the box four hours a day, four days a week. 'Two output indicators were used-the initial output, the number of boxes completed during the first full one-hour test; and the peak output, the maximum number of boxes completed in any one-hour test. The winner was "a paranoid schizophrenic with a delusion of obvious and coherent expression." He folded 600 boxes in the first hour and 1700 in the 15th hour. This is a well-intentioned trial and part of a study that uses many other "indicators" to find out which types of patients are most likely to succeed outside the hospital. But its author didn't discover many things they didn't know. In the end, it was the medication, not the folding of the box, that had an impact on the long-term hospitalized patients, and eventually led to the closure of these institutions in favor of day hospitals and community care.

After we all settled in school in the late 1960s, my mother returned to work in Netherne with these new tools. She is a pioneer in providing community care, and in her case, this means a lot of driving through Surrey to visit patients’ homes and inject them with drugs. She also talked to them, but what I remember was the square black briefcase with a small key, a vial and a needle in it. We have printed the names of various drugs on the biros at home, and our notepads are filled with advertising slogans such as "Largactil, to meet all your mental health needs." Someone at the dinner table talked about "speech stress" (I only understood that this is a symptom of mania a few years ago; I think it means that someone has a lot to say), lithium poisoning, and a state of delusion.

My sister and I will take care of her with her after school or on vacation. Sometimes we have to wait in the back seat of the car, read comics or roll and fight in the back seat. Sometimes we go in. I remember smelling the smell of your urine at some front doors; shabby bodies and misplaced faces; abandoned kitchens, old orange pumpkin bottles and old strong tea biscuits; fear of being spoken, not knowing what to say. However, the home visit was much better than the days we spent in Netherne, and while waiting for the end of the clinic where she worked with Dr. Freudenberg or Dr. Forrest, we patrolled the corridors. It may be that my huge memories of the corridors and their looming huge memories are wrong memories. I can't actually spend too much time on them except when going from room to room or going to the bathroom. But when I was eight or nine years old, I was frightened by the unknown world of the patient. If I accidentally opened the wrong door, I would find terrible consequences.

The history of psychiatric care in the UK after the war, from locked wards and psychological surgery to community psychotherapy, can be tracked very precisely through my mother's work and life. She learned to care for patients who were induced to coma; she assisted surgeons during brain surgery; she poured drugs into the patients' throats, and these patients went against their wishes; she prepared electroconvulsive therapy for the patients, and then took them return. She learned the uses of new psychopharmacological drugs and how to manage them. She was one of the first nurses to receive training in community work. Shortly before her retirement, she worked as an NHS psychotherapist. Although part of me is fascinated by this combination of personal life stories and institutional chronicles, I am also a little shocked by it. Did she not ask a question? I knew that every type of treatment had to be convincing at the time-until it was transferred to the next. I understand that this is how historical changes happen. The past must be believed by enough people to become the past. But what bothers me is that she is so docile. The thought that she could hold onto the agency's narrative so firmly, even under its most punitive and cruel disguise, I was troubled. I am disturbed by her view of the world, and perhaps her view of human nature, which is partly composed of political power.

It does not seem surprising to say that the daily life of a small family farm in Ireland is very different from that of modern bureaucratic organizations. I can fight: small farms and big cities; local communities and non-personal institutions; the known and the unknown. But I’m not sure if any of these will allow me to go further, because I have one basic question left: Why does my mother fit so well with the thousands of other Irish girls who work in these institutions? Why do they feel at home? Is it because although the world looks on the surface, it is not unfamiliar to them, but familiar?

One word used at the dinner table is "institution", but only in adjective form. The problem with this or that patient is that they are already "institutionalized." When my sisters complained that the nuns in their monastery school were particularly annoying or obeyed the rules, my mother smiled and said that their problem was that they were institutionalized. (Because I did not perform well in the entrance exam, I did not go to the monastery. This disappointed my parents, but even then I knew it was a lucky breakthrough.) On the shelf at home is RD’s Pelican version of Lane’s "Split The Self. I remember it because it was included in Charles Dickens’ Edwardian novels (bought in grocery or second-hand stores) and the books we actually read (Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner, and Agatha Christie) The story) next to it is a bit prominent. In the mid-1970s, when my eldest sister went to the University of Birmingham to study English, the bookshelf began to change roles: TS Eliot, Camus, Mabinogion. Laing may be part of the knowledge base of the Birmingham family. But I think it is more likely that my parents bought it in the 1960s, when the debate about madness and the system was fierce.

Since the early 1940s, there have been talks about the dangers of institutionalization, opening up wards, and ending the stigma of mental illness. As early as 1935, the head of Warlingham Park (Christopher Mayhew likened the hospital to a private hotel) began to open and "humanize" his ward. At the end of the war, there were a steady stream of calls for the end of closed institutions. One of the most influential studies in Britain was Russell Barton’s book Institutional Neurosis (1959), which believed that a series of The debilitating symptoms, including apathy, compliance, lack of expression and loss of interest, are caused by the hospital’s own system. Patton, a medical student who voluntarily joined the Belson Relief Program, is not the only one who compares NHS psychiatric hospitals with concentration camps. By the early 1960s, a large number of scholars and practitioners stood up against asylum, from the antipsychiatrists Ryan, David Cooper, Jean Uri, Felix Guattari and Thomas Saz, to Michelle · Foucault and Owen Goffman. Szasz, Foucault and Goffman's main research on asylum culture were all published in 1961. This is a kind of zeitgeist, and it quickly changed the way the organization thinks about the organization. From there, the way they were considered at our dinner table.

Not long ago, I first read that Goffman's research on shelters is a "comprehensive institution", but when I read it, I realized that his ideas silently constructed my childhood. The four articles in the book were first published in the late 1950s, and their impact on Netherne was almost immediate. Within a year, Rudolph Freudenberg launched a "relocation unit" aimed at breaking the control of the "holistic institution" over patients and teaching them what they need to return to work and live in the community. Skill. This is the beautiful new world of the hospital, and it is also the first job my mother found when we returned to work after school.

Goffman is a Canadian sociologist who conducted his first research on the Shetland Islands in the early 1950s, studying the "self-presentation" in daily interactions among islanders. For the shelter, he spent a year on a field trip at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, which has 7,000 prisoners. His book reflects the broad consensus of sociologists and social anthropologists on life in post-war shelters, prisons, monasteries, military camps, and concentration camps. There is evidence in Goffman's book of institutional brutality and neglect, especially when he turns his attention to the punishment and rewards of the "ward system." He confirmed the existence of the organized "checkpoint" plan revealed in "Snake Pit". He severely criticized the forms of deprivation that prisoners suffered in order to encourage them to obey social control-depriving them of their personal property, sometimes even their clothes, and (in extreme religious institutions and prisons) depriving them of their name and even their age. He acknowledged that many hospitals are “prisoner’s shelters” designed to protect the wider community from pollution, but they must be shown to the public as rational organizations designed to produce results in the form of relief and healing. But Goffman is most interested in the stories people have to tell themselves in order to believe in these institutions, and the language they use to tell them.

Goffman realized that many patients did not receive asylum, and many very mildly ill people accepted asylum. He believes that "psychiatric patients are obviously not suffering from mental illness, but suffering from emergencies." Accidental circumstances—how far you are from the hospital, how willing your relatives are to take care of you, how much money they have to share the burden, and whether someone in the family is willing to take you back—determines the difference of being a patient rather than being one. However, the more arbitrary the circumstances that led to your entry into the institution, the more your commitment needs to be expressed based on necessity. What he calls the "moral life" of mental patients includes adapting to narratives in which they are deprived of freedom, relationships, and rights, and subject to collective life, arbitrary authority, and various therapeutic violence. Accepting the necessity of your imprisonment in an institution is called "settling in"; it needs to stop fighting the reality. But what Goffman emphasized is that this is not just simply adapting to the requirements of the ward system and learning to adapt oneself to the reward and punishment system—it requires a new understanding of oneself, which is actually a new life story.

Take the patient's medical history as an example. Like all life stories, case history is constructed retrospectively. The moment the patient enters the shelter, it feels like "life" has been reshaped into a series of symptoms and clues to underlying diseases. The medical history collects information that points to the diagnosis, which explains the facts as a patient. This is a closed circle. Because it is the nature of their human nature that is at risk for the patient, whatever happens to them expresses their entire self-therefore, through the unfolding case history, the patient’s past mistakes and current Progress will be constantly reviewed. For Goffman, the paradox is that the emphasis on moral or "human" progress often leads to fatigue. One of the best ways to survive the ups and downs of the harsh but casual ethical atmosphere of the shelter is to cultivate a kind of "civic indifference." It is much easier to treat one's own destiny as a hopeless case than to fight it. In other words, you might as well give up. The process described by Goffman is one of the processes of learning consent. When patients agree to their condition as patients, they are helping staff to keep the organization running.

Goffman didn't say much about the ethics of the staff. Their job is to guide patients along the hospital's assembly line, and all bureaucratic documents and equipment are required to do so. The many benefits that employees get from agreeing to play their roles are obvious: security, salary, training, sometimes a home, sometimes a career. Goffman believes that the contradiction between the organization's behavior and the behavior described by its officials constitutes the basic background of employees' daily activities. Whether the main goal is patient custody or psychiatric care, measuring the ethical atmosphere of patient behavior provides the key to the meaning of patients and staff. "Industrial" or work therapy, for example, in farms, bakeries, laundries or wards, are mostly unpaid. The meaning of work has been redefined, and now it is a question of improving patients’ morals and human abilities. Roughly speaking, these institutions require patients to learn to express their human capabilities, and staff members are paid for constructing a framework that allows expressing such capabilities.

I am fascinated by a passage in Goffman's book, in which he describes the drama performed by "senior" patients at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the benefit of local fundraisers and philanthropists. This is a version of my mother's transformation from a nurse to a "good" voluntary patient in Out of True, but this performance involves "good" mental patients acting as their own "bad" version:

I have seen mental patients from good wards perform on public stages with much publicity. This is probably a common condition in backward mental hospitals. Use Victorian clothing. The audience included enlightened psychiatric blessers from surrounding cities. There are several buildings away from where the audience sits, and the same bad situation can be observed in the flesh. In some cases, performers know their roles well because they have already played roles.

These patients participated in the promotion at their own expense-pretending that Victorian clothing had fallen behind the conditions of the workhouse. In fact, Goffman believes that the entire structure of institutional care is based on performance. Whether the focus is on guardianship (cage) or treatment (warm fireside), the shelter framework requires people to play the roles assigned to them. If patients refuse to agree to their role as patients, these institutions will stop working, and staff will question their role as staff.

My mother's nursing career is a success story of health progress, which depends on an opposite disease story. Goffman would be happy that she could switch roles simply by changing her uniform into summer clothes, because it shows that, deep down, the difference between staff and patients is dramatic, not substantial. In fact, the slippage between roles is constantly occurring within the organization. Christmas pantomimes, hospital newspapers, sporting events, open wards, and visits to patients in local villages all reflect the basic similarities of the players. But the bureaucratic operation of the agency depends on everyone playing their role as if they were serious. During a flight over the cuckoo’s nest, Randall McMurphy pretended to have a mental illness because he believed that incarceration in a mental hospital was softer than prison, but he was eventually trapped-and destroyed-by this character because he refused to agree to it .

But I don’t have to go to American movies to find a story about role swapping. There is a place closer to home, about my mother's friend Gibson. I have known this story since I was nineteen or twenty. This is the first time I have left university. Gibson is my mother's best friend—an English girl from a western country who trains with her in the Netherne. They are not the most likely duo: I think Gibson was born relatively wealthy, an only child, and her father is a civil servant. After the war, she worked as a commercial artist for several years until she decided to train as a nurse. If you think about it, this is a strange choice. Nursing is a low-level job that is provided for immigrants from Wales, Ireland or later from the West Indies. Nevertheless, Gibson chose it as a career, and she and my mother became inseparable. When my mother left Netherne to go to Mile End Hospital for general training, she wrote to Gibson and advised her to join her, and she did. When she moved to Whips Cross Hospital again, Gibson also went. They have been a team in three different hospitals for four or five years. I know these friendships—the ones you had when you first left home and walked on your own. They are part of the structure that understands who you are or who you might become, and they last a lifetime, or they can do it. But not in this case.

My mother hadn’t met Gibson before I was born, although she still tells stories about her, these stories are usually funny, like their jokes at the expense of their arrogant lecturers, some of whom have been discharged from the army. Put yourself in the posture of a soldier. But there is always a hesitation, a choked throat, hovering around Gibson's name. I don't remember if I ever asked them if they were offline or why, but one day my mother blurted it out. Sometime in the late 1950s, after my parents got married and moved away, Gibson requested and obtained a leukotomy. I still remember my fear and incredible feeling when I heard this story. My mother said that she wanted to relieve anxiety. She wanted to free herself from the burden of thinking. I don't believe it. Voluntarily let your brain be chopped off? Believe people like the temporary doctor who plays with plastic brains in The Hurt Mind? Just believe it?

I went on frantically, asking for more. I want to break through those unspoken barriers. Looking back now, I sympathize with my young self—impatient and polite, eager to understand—and I am ashamed of her. Why do I think I have the right to know? I saw my mother's sadness, but it didn't stop me.

"I think," my mother said at last, "she is not satisfied with her sexuality." I stared at her. At least I know not to ask anymore. In any case, all this has been said. A few years after the operation, my mother said that Gibson committed suicide. What you ask and what you don't ask is very interesting. I didn't ask why-it seemed obvious. I didn't ask how to do it; it seemed cruel.

I didn't ask, it feels weird to tell this story now. The trouble with telling Gibson's story is that I approached her as if she were a case. She appears here as evidence of something, just like Georgia N. or Dorothy Q. in the Netherne study. Or it's not different enough anyway. As a person, I cannot continue to approach Gibson, but I am loading meaning on the bare bones that I know, nonetheless. I feel uncomfortable, but the more uncomfortable idea is that Gibson may also see himself as a medical record. She tried to diagnose and violently intervene in the pain of love. She believes in the hype surrounding the new physical therapy. She believes it too much, maybe she needs to do it. Even though she was not asked, she agreed.

During my childhood visit to Netherne in the early 1970s, I discovered that the period when these hospitals were mainly used as confinement facilities was coming to an end. They are beginning to be dismantled to support community care, and the fact that my sister and I can hang out in the corridors suggests that a more open treatment environment is taking shape. Netherne is progressive, and it must feel good to be part of that wave of experiments, especially considering Ireland’s reputation for psychiatric treatment. Ireland has the highest proportion of people in mental hospitals in the world and has the fewest patients there. In England, the boundaries between inside and outside institutions are not only looser, but-as the existence of Irish mother and child homes and huge shelters have shown-the differences are widening. For my mother, moving to the UK in the late 1940s meant moving into the future.

Changes in the consent nature of the system played an important role in this future. In all the institutions described by Goffman, the patient's consent to their condition as a patient is almost the same as acquiescence. People living outside also need a kind of silent acquiescence, they know the existence of these institutions (maybe there are family members in them) but don't want to know too much about what is going on in them. In this model, the organization is fully integrated into the operation of the community, but at the same time completely isolated—invisible to ordinary people. A friend of mine from Dublin likes to play a living room game. He asked the locals to tell him the location of Grangegorman, a psychiatric hospital in Dublin that retired in 2013. It is on the north side, in the center between Phoenix Park and Phoenix Park. O'Connell Street is now part of Dublin University of Technology. But everyone launched it somewhere in the country, or they guessed it was in suburbs like Artane, Santry, or Ballymun. The hospital was and is an almost fabulous building, no matter where it is or where it is, it looks very big, but it can't be found.

When the doors of the hospital were opened to film crews, politicians, Photo and Post reporters, and children, the boundaries between the civilian world and the prisoner world became blurred. This is a process driven by the changing concept of mental health and the use of vital psychopharmacological drugs. The community that had to agree to the way the hospital works has expanded to the general public. People are seeking a different kind of legitimacy. The progressive agency’s narrative disarmed criticism and sought public affirmation and consent. However, with the implication that we are all potential patients, the boundaries of the hospital have become difficult to distinguish. Technically, the agency cannot be internal or external, and people like my mother's friend Gibson can agree to their own damage without going through any door.

In 1971, a government-sponsored organization made another film in Netherne—this time the Art Committee. This is a portrait of the sculptor Rolanda Polonsky. Netherne's reputation as an enlightened institution was enhanced by its pioneering role as an art therapy center under Adamson's leadership. In 1946, Eric Cunningham Dax invited Adamson to set up an art therapy studio on the premises, which was later expanded to include an exhibition space. Initially, the art room was a kind of research laboratory. Give each patient the same size paper, the same easel, and the same pencil and paint so that their products can be compared scientifically. This is where JJ Beegan covers his paper with "esoteric writing". The patient’s artwork is seen as additional “evidence” to be added to their medical records. Eleanor Roosevelt lamented that she did not have time to visit the art studio when she went to the hospital in the spring of 1948:

I'm sorry that I didn't have the opportunity to read a book drawn by a patient. Many of them have never painted before. For psychiatrists, I believe these paintings will tell a patient's mental state at different stages of the disease. None of them received guidance. They just draw the thoughts in their minds and want to write them on paper.

Psychiatrists also think they can tell the number. Francis Reitman, a colleague of Cunningham Dax and director of clinical research at the hospital, firmly believes that mental illness has organic causes and can therefore be cured by physical therapy. He is keen to use the studio as a way to test visual expression. After leukotomy. Netherne is his laboratory, and the patient is his guinea pig. Like everyone else in the hospital, he published his findings. In his case, a book called "The Art of Psychiatry" was published in 1950.

Adamson is certainly not as dogmatic as his boss. He was very interested in Jung’s ideas about creativity and expanded the scope of the studio to the extent that during his 35 years in the hospital, it became less and less connected with research and more and more became an art experiment And a place for self-expression. However, Adamson’s reminiscences of his first year in the hospital in the late 1940s remind us that although all “front-office” performances were held for outsiders, Nethann also had his punitive “back-office” ward as well as a system of neglect and deprivation. structure. During his first visit in 1946, he "passed through a long corridor and many locked and relocked doors" and found that Biegun and a hundred people were "wrapped in bandages" and "brought and black after surgery. And disfigured" the hall. Eye'. This is the "deteriorating" ward, and these are the patients Cunningham Dax is conducting leukotomy experiments on these patients. Adamson saw some reappearance of violence and suffering in the art studio because he collected most of the works approved there and encouraged the art committee to make a film in the 1970s, and we can see it too.

We don't know if JJ Beegan's "sculptor" received artist training before working on the Netherne. But we do know that Rolanda Polonsky went to art school, and some of her works have been exhibited in small exhibitions. Her work is not naive, undirected self-expression ("they just draw things in their hearts"), it is the kind sought by doctors such as Reitman, and for different reasons-the kind sought by the Art Brut movement . Polonski was born in 1923 in an upper-middle class family in northern Italy. Her parents were both opera actors, and her maternal grandfather was the British writer and philosopher Thomas Bailey Saunders (Schopenhauer's authority). In 1947, she graduated from the University of Florence with a degree in political science. She was commissioned to go to Paris and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière for a short time, probably informally.

It is unclear why she came to the UK. Maybe she came to visit relatives; maybe she participated in an immigration work program for young Italian, German, and Baltic women seeking to escape extreme poverty in the post-war European continent, although this seems unlikely given her background. Perhaps she was traveling to participate in a small sculpture exhibition organized by the Belgian surrealist poet and painter ELT Mesens in a London gallery in 1950. Masons may have encountered Polonsky's work in Paris after the war, but it seems more likely that Adamson arranged for it to be exhibited in London. He knew Masons and Roland Penrose, owner of the London Gallery, and collaborated with the later "Schizophrenia Art" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. When exhibiting at the London gallery, as shyly pointed out in the catalog, Polonsky "lives and works in the UK." At some point in the late 1940s, she appeared to be suffering from an acute psychotic episode. She must have been sent to Nethern shortly after arriving in the UK, because by the time of the art committee's film production in 1971, according to reviews, she had been in the hospital for 24 years. When Roosevelt visited in 1948, she was probably mopping the floor in the ward, and she was doing this when Adamson found her.

But the art committee is not interested in her history. This 10-minute film directed by artist Lionel Miskin wants the audience to think about what they can learn from watching the artwork without expecting the audience to see it. Organizations redefine not only the meaning of work, but also the meaning of self-expression. The voice-over explains that Polonsky suffers from schizophrenia. "Her illness caused her to suffer so much. In fact, she has unearthed the deep source of mysterious vision and human emotion." Encouraging viewers to regard this vision as not only pathological, but also the product of imprisoned thoughts, this approach obviously brings Voyeurism: "In the so-called rational social world, artists enjoy expectations of family life and friendship, and a certain degree of recognition of their works. Artists may pay more attention to our surroundings than most people. In contrast, , Schizophrenic patients paint or sculpt in the enclosed world of a mental hospital.

Polonsky himself is a fragile figure. She hesitated through the corridors of the hospital (they took me back to my eight-year-old self); she spoke softly in paused English, her eyes flickering in the light. Her subjects are Christian portraits and what she calls "eternity". There are repeated images of the cross, the deposition of Christ, praying hands, angels, and crowds. When she retouched each artwork for the camera, it was obvious that every detail had meaning to her and was a correspondence. Polonsky is not interested in the aesthetic appeal of her art—she knows nothing about form or style. The thoughts of audiences other than herself seemed unfamiliar and unimportant to her. On the contrary, painting and sculpture are a way of thinking and understanding pain. She stretched out her hand to seek the suffering of Christ on the cross, in order to understand-or give her own meaning of suffering.

Ink painting by Rolanda Polonsky.

Several of her works for the Arts Council’s films are a series of plaster models of the station of the cross, planned as a set of 14 reliefs and altarpieces for the Netherne Church. They are now kept in a shop at Beckenham Bethlem Royal Hospital (Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in Beckett). When I went there recently to see them, I was surprised by the contrast between the size of these works (some of them are 10 feet wide) and their handmade quality. These reliefs were made without tools-you can see the finger prints of Polonsky rubbing the plaster into the shape of a suffering Christ or a group of penitents. My fingers can adapt to her fingerprints. It was as if her body, the weight of her fingers and the pressure of her hands, were still hovering in the plaster. The relief is like a body radiation, and it looks much stronger than the uncertain person speaking in the movie.

When she pointed out the confession and painful body she had made to the camera, Polonsky said "this is very simple" or "this is very simple". "This is a calculation of the Last Supper," she said, depicting a hanged and strangely pierced corpse. The spider-like figure drawn without picking up the pencil from the paper is like a torture picture with dark circles on the chest. She explained that her view of the body on the cross was "not a man, but a woman." Because, in my humble opinion, women have more crosses in the world than men themselves. She described a series of pencil drawings of the bodies as "the last judgment was not done by heaven but by the cursed people. They were hung in grotesque and tormented positions, as if they were hung by their necks." Because at the end One morning, as the Prophet told us, damn people would speak, and had to say their words.

She stood with her head tilted back, reflecting the posture of a girl's sculpted head thrown back. She explained that this is the representative

The girl who lost her virginity. So, she was so surprised by the emotional behavior of men that she didn't know what to think or how to do. At this moment she is hell and heaven, thinking back to her old life in the first few years, and you are an innocent person. Suddenly she grew up, and this is the portrait of this moment.

The scene is ugly. If this is not a personal experience, it must be extreme identification. There are more manifestations of female bodies, mothers with babies, and many painful bodies: "I think everyone is broken in their lives. Life goes by, but people are also broken. So, I use Jesus to represent it. Where Jesus was broken Now, his life was taken away because...because he was pushed aside.

A portrait still of a Polonsky movie taken by Lionel Miskin in 1971.

Polonsky's story was constructed entirely within the institution she had to study—in English—to adapt to the shelved life. She has resigned, and she turned to religious portraits to portray this resignation. I think most of the vocabulary learned in the hospital echoes her limited life in the institution. This is a form of speech that repeats and loops back to the original hurt that she can't express. There are some unspeakable things here, and it is hard to ignore the possibility (perhaps the possibility should be said) that Polonsky's life will be destroyed by sexual violence. She was unmarried when she entered the institution and has always been. The girl was "so surprised," she told us gently. She didn't know what to think. Her sculptures-and the way she glazes them-force us to speculate that her own life was "taken away" and the experience of being imprisoned (eventually) for more than 35 years is a cross that women must face Special bear.

I imagine other stories for her. In addition to leukotomy, Netherne's simple operating room is also used for termination, or therapeutic abortion known before the passage of the Abortion Act in 1967. If the mother’s life is in danger and abortion is legal, psychiatrists can recommend abortion to women suffering from mental illness and depression, as well as women who threaten suicide (usually single women). In the first few years after she came to the hospital in 1949, my mother estimated that she underwent six of these surgical interventions in the operating room. In fact, she is helping to host one of the secular alternatives to the Irish Mother and Child Home. Does Polonsky's repeated pictures of mother and baby show what she has lost? "People always bring babies," she said in the film. "You can't see people without babies, because babies are life."

I know that when imagining Polonsky's past, I am struggling with her own performance of her own life, which is eternal—a kind of "eternal" expression. This is a story of correspondence and metaphor, not a story with a past and a future. After all, those things have been taken away from her. Before she entered the hospital, she had lost contact with the past, and she seemed to accept that her future was more of the present. In fact, Polonsky was eventually rescued by her sister. She was visiting from Paris. In fact, a doctor asked her: "Why did you leave your sister in this place?" Polonsky chose to stay with her. The monastery in her hometown of Rovereto spent the last years of her life. She chose another institution. But in 1971, she had settled down and spent half of her life. The story she told was about meaning rather than experience—in fact, all personal experience had been emptied. She has wiped herself out.

I was troubled by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, who walked through those hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self opened the door that scared me, I might find her then, just like I am now in a movie I watched on my laptop. Now it seems to me that this is why I am afraid: I don't want to hear the message she gave me. But she hovered in the half-dream and half-awake past like an uninvited guest—she would not leave. What does she want me to see but I don't want to see? What does she want me to know?

Rolanda Polonsky and my mother's "moral career" are parallel to each other, and they do depend on each other. They arrived at the hospital at about the same time, and they lived and lived in the facility for most of their adult life. In the 1970s, we all walked through the same corridors, but some of us came from outside and some were locked inside. Polonsky was obviously sick, or had been sick, but by the 1970s, part of her pain was the hospital itself. Art is her way of expressing pain, but the camera presented to the art committee also forms part of the institution's official narrative. Art therapy stories are a way of verifying the public’s consent to the entire organization. I grew up in that affirmative mode. The stories my grandparents and parents tell about this institution are all about productive lives-career, marriage, family and future are all based on Netherne's work. They are stories that fit the narrative of institutional progress, dedicated to treatment and healing until they are dismantled to support another model, community care. They are not untrue stories. However, they are incomplete.

For a long time, I think Polonsky’s story has been bothering me because it represents an absolute alternative to my mother’s story. It’s negative, and of course, this is largely true. They are women of similar age who arrived in the UK a few years after the war, and although one of them was able to succeed from her connection with the hospital, the other (despite her finding a way of life) was still subject to it. Although my mother may play the role of a patient, she has never experienced reality. However, I want to know if I don't want to hear without further information-the stories of these two women are the same. Both of these women as immigrants are separated from the past of the family without them and the future they might have there. Both contributed to the story of psychiatric progress. But the core of Polonsky’s art is a truth that runs counter to this progressive story: despite the sun-drenched site and airy wards, and the seemingly porous boundary between the inside and outside of the institution, you may still be buried there.

Listen to Claire Wells discuss this article with Thomas Jones on the LRB podcast.

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