



Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive.)









MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM




  LONDON: PRINTED BY
  SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
  AND PARLIAMENT STREET




  MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM


  _BY A SANE PATIENT_


  'Let us rise and revolt against those people, Lankin. Let us war with
  them and smite them utterly. It is to use against these, especially,
  that scorn and satire were invented'

  'And the animal you attack,' says Lankin, 'is provided with a hide to
  defend him--it is a common ordinance of nature'--M. A. TITMARSH


  London
  CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
  1879

  [_The right of translation is reserved_]




MY EXPERIENCES IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM.




I.

  It's a mad world, my masters.


I suppose that the motto I have affixed to the first chapter of the brief
history of a singular personal experience is by this time an accepted
axiom. Was it in one of Mr. Sala's columns of gossip that I was reading
the other day of the man of the pen who commented upon the imprisonment in
an asylum of a brother of his craft merely by saying, 'What a fool he must
be! For years I have been as mad as he, only I took care never to say so'?
There are odd corners in the brains of most of us, filled with queer
fancies which are as well kept out of sight; eccentricities, I suppose
they may be called. The man who is so 'concentric' as to be innocent of
peculiarities is a companion of a dull sort. But Heaven help us all when
such things may be called, and treated as, madness. For, if all of us were
used according to our deserts in that way, who should escape the modern
substitutes for whipping? England would not contain the asylums that
should be constructed, and might go far to deserve the Gravedigger's
description of her for Hamlet's benefit: 'There the men are as mad as he.'
Let me go a step further. There are few of us, perhaps, who have not seen
something in our lives of the strange nervous disorders which have been
generalised as 'hypochondria,' which are, in fact, I think, the different
outcomes of a common affection--temporary exhaustion of brain. Beyond a
certain point it becomes delirium, the wandering of weakness which is so
closely connected with many forms of illness, both in the beginning and
during the course and recovery. When the victims of delirium may be added
to the eccentric members of society; when at any moment the certificates
of any two doctors who may be utter strangers to the patient--acting under
the instructions of friends who are frightened and perplexed, perhaps, and
try to believe that they are 'doing for the best' (I leave out of
consideration here the baser motives which, it is to be feared, come
sometimes into play)--may condemn him to the worst form of false
imprisonment, the death-in-life of a lunatic asylum, at a time when he is
himself practically unconscious;--who is there amongst us who can for a
moment believe himself safe? Death-in-life did I say? It is worse; for it
is a life-in-life, worse than any conceivable form of death. The sights
and sounds through which one has to live can never be forgotten by him
who has lived through them, but will haunt him ever and always. Never let
next friends persuade themselves that they are 'doing for the best' for
him for whom they so do. For themselves they may think that they are. For
him they cannot possibly do worse. Every nerve should be strained to save
a man from that fate, if it be humanly possible, ay, even if he be mad
indeed; for while there is life there is hope, till that step has been
taken. When it has, I verily believe that hope is reduced to its smallest.
For the personal experience which I have to tell has taught me this: that
the man who comes sane and safe out of the hands of mad-doctors and
warders, with all the wonderful network of complications which, by
Commissioners, certificates, and Heaven knows what, our law has woven
round the unlucky victim in the worst of all its various aberrations, is
very sane indeed. And very safe too, happily. His lines afterwards are
not altogether pleasant. The curious looks and whispers, the first
meetings with old friends, the general anxiety that he should not 'excite
himself' (which he may be better excused for doing than most people,
perhaps), magnified, no doubt, by his own natural sensitiveness, are
difficult in their way. He does not mind them much, is amused by them at
times; for, with the strong sense of right on one's side, conflict is
rather pleasant than not to the well-balanced soul. But the thread of life
and work and duty has been rudely broken by the shock, and has to be knit
again under great drawbacks. It can be done, though; and one starts again
the wiser and the better man.

'Jurant, quoiqu'un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendra plus.' It is no bad
thing to have part of one's work and duty so clearly pointed out as this
of mine. When this evil question is being stirred to its depths as it is
now, every contribution of personal experience is valuable. It is not for
me to suggest schemes of reform, as it is the fashion to ask critics to
do, but for those who are paid to do that work rightly and earnestly, or
who choose to undertake to legislate for us. Nor have I any advice to
offer them except the advice of Hamlet: 'O, reform it altogether.' The
system is radically wrong, all through, under which such wrong is
possible. And I believe it all the more because it seems to me without
reasonable excuse. Madness is the most terrible of all visitations; but
also, probably for that very reason, the most unmistakable. And in spite
of doctors and lawyers and the whole artillery of organised Humbug, I have
deduced another lesson from this hard experience of mine: I do not believe
that there is any mistaking a madman when you see him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The especial experience which I have to tell has nothing especially
painful, and is, perhaps, none the worse for that. I have nothing to
write of dark rooms or strait-waistcoats or whippings, or to reveal such
secrets of the prison-house as will make each particular hair to stand on
end by the telling. My lines were cast in pleasant places. The private
asylum in which I was confined for many months, which in the retrospect
seem like one dreary dream, is, I believe, highly recommended by Her
Majesty's Commissioners as a delightful sanitary resort--quite a place to
spend 'a happy life.' During those months I had the advantage of living in
a castellated mansion, in one of the prettiest parts of England, which I
shall hate to my dying day, with a constant variety of attendants, who
honoured me by sleeping in my room, sometimes as many as three at a time.
I was dying in delirium and prostration, simply, and wasted to a shadow;
consequently voted 'violent,' as the best way out of it. With carriages to
take me out for drives, closed upon wet days, open on fine; with cricket
and bowls and archery for the summer, and a pack of harriers to follow
across country in the winter; with the head of the establishment, who
lived in a sweet little cottage with his family, to give me five o'clock
tea on the Sundays; with five refections a day whereof to partake, with my
fellow-lunatics, if so disposed, in my private sitting-room when I could
not stand it; with a private chapel for morning prayers or Sunday service,
the same companions and attendants for a congregation, and some visitors
who would come to look at us; with little evening parties for whist or
music amongst 'ourselves,' and a casual conjuror or entertainer from town
to distract us sometimes for an evening; with an occasional relative to
come and see me, beg me not to get excited, and depart as soon as
possible,--what more could man desire? As I look at this last sentence of
mine it reads like an advertisement. Stay--I had forgotten the medicine.
They did not give me very much of it, I suppose, or I should not be alive.
Indeed, it seemed to me that the general principle was to give it when one
asked for it, and pretty much what one asked for. When I got unusually
weak and delirious a good strong dose on the 'violent' theory--homoeopathy,
I suppose, from a new point of view--was enough, literally, to _reduce_ me
to reason. For then I became too weak to speak, and the matter ended for a
time.

All this bears so fair an outside that it seems difficult to quarrel with
it. Yet the life that it concealed was inconceivably terrible. My head was
full of the weakest, the most varying, the most wandering fancies--the
fancies of sheer and long-continued exhaustion. These parties, games,
entertainments, meals, without a friend's face near me, without hope,
wish, or volition; with the shouts and cries of the really violent to wake
me sometimes at night; with every form of personal affliction to haunt
and mock and yet companion me by day; with poor fellows playing all sorts
of strange antics round me, herded together anyhow or nohow, with or
without private rooms of their own--more, I am afraid, in proportion as
their friends could or would pay for them or not, on the footing of
'first-class patients' than on any other intelligible principle; with
Death in the house every now and then, falling suddenly and terribly on
one of these unhappy outcasts from some unsuspected malady within, which
they could not explain, spoken of in whispers, and hushed up and forgotten
as soon as might be; with the ward