Bootham Bar:
Psychiatry & Mental Illness in York
Just a short stroll out of the city walls through Bootham Bar and along the road called Bootham, there is a vista of many beautiful Georgian buildings. A few hundred yards along, set back off the road in its own grounds stands what you might mistake for a country house. It is in fact, Bootham Park Hospital, formerly the notorious York Lunatic Asylum.
Founded in 1777, this institution was at the core of a controversy when in 1815, public authorities realised that some serious mistreatments used to take place between its walls. Furthermore, between 1777 and 1813, it was found that 365 patients, at least, died in this facility. Why so many?
Answering this question will provide us with an opportunity to touch on several points of sociological interest. Psychiatry itself is an interesting institution to study the divisions taking place in a given population. Who is excluded? Who is privileged? Who is visible or invisible? Who is deemed crazy or rational? At that time, as archives show, psychiatric hospitals would ‘welcome’ - often with physical restraints - people deemed crazy, of course, but also a wide range of patients: sometimes poor people, people suffering from degenerative diseases and sexually-transmitted diseases, as well as elderly people whose family could not take care of. This partly explains such a high death rate.
But there is more: if psychiatry appeared during the industrial revolution, it is because, before that time, ‘crazy people’ were mostly looked after by their family, close or extended, and their community at large. The massification of the model of the factory made it impossible for many families to keep their unproductive members at home, and large institutions such as psychiatric wards became seen as necessary.
Finally, new policies were progressively implemented. In York, The Retreat, which had opened its doors in 1796, privileged more humanistic types of treatment, until today. Furthermore, the very way in which societies deal with mental health has become completely different. The emergence and diffusion of psychiatric drugs through the twentieth century enabled many to receive care while staying home. So, psychiatric hospitals did not exactly transform into better places: but also, mental health care somewhat dissolved in the city.
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Baptiste Brossard is a sociologist currently working in the areas of critical mental health and historical sociology. After studying sociology, anthropology and history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris and School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, he worked at the University of Montreal as a postdoctoral researcher before obtaining his first position at the Australian National University in 2016. He then joined the Department of Sociology of the University of York in January 2022. Baptiste’s current research agenda pursues two directions: critical mental health studies and historical sociology.
