Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland by Brendan Kelly (review)

Abstract

educational and disciplinary revival to Cullen’s initiatives in later decades. Raising Dublin is a welcome contribution to the historiography of religion in nineteenth-century Ireland. Spratt was indeed, ‘the Friend of Dublin’s poor’, but his activities and achievements provide a broader insight into the character of Catholic Dublin more generally, and the web of connections which supported the transitions associated with prominent politicians and prelates. This biography provides us with a sense of the networks of the city, Catholic activists and liberal protestants, who worked, in the face of famine, destitution, drunkenness and ignorance, to shape the architecture of devotion and care which endured for a century and a half. Dáire Keogh is Deputy President and Professor of History at Dublin City University. Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland, Brendan Kelly (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), 500 pages. Like many of my generation of psychiatrists who entered the discipline at a time when those institutions that had once functioned as asylums were finally being dismantled, I was conscious of many of the difficult stories that haunt psychiatry’s past. The telling of these stories is long overdue and thus I enthusiastically welcome Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland, Professor Brendan Kelly’s recent book. Like so much else in the history of our island, Irish psychiatry’s past is frequently occluded by the half-truths of collective memory and the reluctant silence of shame. Kelly’s book serves to lift the veil on this little-studied aspect of Irish history and shines a light on a much-neglected area of our country’s past. As is pointed out in the laudatory foreword by Professor Dr Edward D Shorter of the University of Toronto, this work represents the first thorough and over-arching treatment of the history of psychiatry on this island. It spans the period from the earliest beginnings of that discipline in the Middle Ages up to the present day and looks beyond to the challenges facing us in the future. In the task of compiling this comprehensive history, Kelly is probably uniquely placed. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, and a consultant psychiatrist at Tallaght Hospital, Dublin. He holds, in addition to his medical degree, master’s degrees in epidemiology, health Studies • volume 107 • number 428 513 Winter 2018/19: Book Reviews care management and Buddhist studies, and doctorates in medicine, history, governance and law. He has written extensively on a variety of subjects relating to mental health, law and history. In particular, his experience in practice gives a voice – albeit by proxy – to those whom he has accompanied through the struggle and disappointment, as well as the grace and heroism, that surrounds mental illness. That this book is determinedly human in focus is evident from the work’s epilogue and prologue. Both of these contain moving accounts of tragic lives of individuals: the prologue quotes a short and affecting account by playwright Sean O’Casey of the situation of a relative who died in Grangegorman in Dublin from general paralysis of the insane, having spent the last two years of his life there. The epilogue relates the story of French sculptor Camille Claudel, who in the early 1900s was confined to an asylum at her family’s insistence and remained there for thirty years, until she died in 1943. Buried in an asylum grave, asylum staff were the only mourners to attend her funeral, a situation that sadly resonates with those of us who have worked within an asylum setting. The prologue is succeeded by an immediately engaging and brilliantly crafted introduction. This serves as an excellent guide to the navigation of the book’s subsequent chapters and will be especially helpful to those who lack previous familiarity with the subject matter. Professor Kelly’s explanation of the book’s title is particularly enlightening. ‘Hearing voices’ subverts the traditional medical usage of the phrase in order to draw attention to two of the work’s core themes: to make public those voices which have historically gone unheard, and to advocate for the empowerment of those who suffer now and in the future. This chapter also...