Tag Archives: Our Lady’s

ENNIS Mental Hospital, the now closed Our Lady’s Hospital, features prominently in a new history of psychiatry in Ireland. Brendan Kelly, consultant psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry in Trinity College, Dublin, in his new book, Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland (Irish Academic Press), gives an insight into what life was like in “public asylums” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Ireland, the history of psychiatry is dominated by the vast network of public asylums that opened across the country during the 1800s. This extraordinary mass institutionalisation was underpinned by genuine concern for the destitute mentally ill, who lived lives of vagrancy or languished in prisons in the early 1800s. Despite the initial idealism, however, the asylums were soon overcrowded, anti-therapeutic and extremely unhealthy places. This large gap between rhetoric and reality was demonstrated vividly in 1843, when a select committee of the House of Lords provided a hard-hitting report on the “state of the lunatic …

By Dan Danaher A BRAIN-damaged, assault victim requires 24-hour security at Ennis hospital psychiatric unit, at a cost of €408,000 last year, it has emerged. Health authorities have not responded to Care Champion queries about the six-year delay in providing an appropriate high secure facility for the 31-year-old man suffering from organic brain syndrome following a serious assault. Solicitor Marie Keane said this week that her client is inappropriately placed as an involuntary psychiatric patient in the high observation unit of the acute psychiatric unit at Ennis Hospital since February 2008. He is not a psychiatric patient. She has called on the Department of Health to fast track the provision of a proper small residential facility for patients suffering from frontal lobe injury that affects affect their comprehension and can result in unpredictable and sometimes unintentional violent behaviour. Ms Keane has confirmed there is no suitable facility for his specific condition in the Republic of Ireland to accommodate her client, …