A SPELL IN THE NUTHOUSE
I was up in St Brigid's this week. No, just visiting. Really. A friend got tossed down the booby hatch and we went along to see if he'd stopped quacking yet.
Nobody in Galway, in all Connacht indeed, will be mystified for a moment by the mention of "St Brigid's". The name is a byword - which tells you what a large part it plays in our lives. For the online readers though, St Brigid's is the main psychiatric hospital for the west of Ireland. That is, in the country with the highest incidence of schizophrenia in Europe, in the region where that schizophrenia is most concentrated, St Brigid's is where they put the schizophrenics.
It's quite big.
And ugly. They may call it a psychiatric hospital now (or God knows, they may call it a residential airport for people with special realities), but that doesn't stop it looking exactly like what it originally was - a Victorian lunatic asylum. Why it was named after the main fertility goddess of the Celts is not entirely clear, (early Christians casually appropriated her as a saint), though I suppose it's good PR. How disappointed the inmates must be that the treatment doesn't involve naked revels at the Spring equinox. To be entirely accurate though our friend was in St Luke's, a department where they cure mental illness using something they call 'the Force'. Okay, not really.
I reckon the signage was done in-house, because like most inmates it was both impoverished and quite mad. At the gate it simply told us that reception was to the right, so we went to the first building on the right. This had a positive embarrassment of entrances, but none were marked with anything except numbers. Eventually we elected to try the one with flowers outside, on the assumption that this meant they were at least not actively discouraging visitors. We walked in and asked directions off the first people we met.
The first people we met were, of course, mad. One of them did try, but I think she put in one right turn too many and ended up in an endless loop. We were grateful to be rescued by a harassed nurse who pointed us on towards the main building - a lump of institution cake reflecting the uncomplicated Victorian assumption that an asylum is a cross between a hospital and a prison. From there it took only one more layer of directions to reach St Luke's.
Our friend was better, thanks to the wonders of serious brain drugs, but bored. There's not a lot of entertainment around there. They weren't giving anybody electroshock at the time, and I'm not completely sure if they let you watch anyway. There was a TV or two, a couple of videos in the evening. A few books, some games with pieces missing, kids' jigsaws. At other times there were occupational therapy classes, but if I said they did basket weaving I'd be cruelly exaggerating the glamour of it all. About the only thing we could do together was go to the games room.
Games room. There were two pool tables - homemade ones. Now I've never had a serious mood disorder, apart from in the mornings, but I think the last thing I'd need would be a non-flat pool table. Especially not while I had a cue in my hands. There was also badminton gear. Watching me play the shuttlecock is funny at the best of times, but this was hilarious. My opponent got a point off me by playing straight through a hole in the net. It was full of them. Or rather, short of them - it should have many small holes, not few big. The table tennis set was pathetic too. It had one bad bat, and one bloody atrocious bat. After we played it was even worse; I trod on the only ball. (And not just because I was losing, I deny that categorically.)
I appreciate that things like these get damaged fairly frequently in psychiatric institutions, maybe nearly as often as they do in youth clubs, but how much can they cost? The country has been coining it for the last decade, yet all the people in our psychiatric hospitals have got to play with is bent pool cues and broken ping pong bats. I mean for God's sake, these people are in here because they're already depressed.