Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Bedlam

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Bedlam: a scene of uproar and confusion, a noisy situation with no order or, originally, the slang name for a mental hospital in London… which for a while also happened to be a popular tourist attraction.From chains on the wall to leeching - the history of mental health treatments is a lesson in questionable science and humanity.Bethlehem hospital, founded around the 11th century in London, is a study of this history.Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by Catharine Arnold: journalist, academic, popular historian and author of ‘Bedlam: London and Its Mad’.*WARNING this episode includes adult themes and conversations about mental health*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Matt Peaty.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This episode includes music by Epidemic Sound and an archive clip from an American public service announcement from 1952. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Just a quick one from me, I should warn you that this episode contains description of mental health conditions and their historical treatment, some of which can be quite upsetting. They've all learned habits of good living that have helped them stay physically healthy. But there's another side to good health, and that's good mental health. What do you think Bedlam is? Is it a crowd rushing to a football match?

Black Friday in a shopping centre or a tailback on a motorway. It's Bedlam. But what was Bedlam? Bedlam was a medieval hospital for the mentally ill. Its history is really dark and troubling. Did you know, for example, that the people of London once paid good money to go and look at the patients, or rather the inmates of Bedlam? Today on Betwixt the Sheets, I gate lister, I'm delving into this rather dark and troubling history.

call a man. Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing a bunch of money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it,

Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. As now, I think it is expected this episode may contained some fruity language and some adult themes. One of the most important questions from the history of mental health is just who was considered to be mad and who was doing the considering? When we look at the history, it didn't take much.

Wayward wives, people with learning difficulties, just the elderly sometimes, were all condemned as insane and locked away in these hospitals. In this episode from our special series for Mental Health Week, I'm going to find out why this was thought to be acceptable and how the treatment of people suffering from mental illness in Britain, particularly London, has changed over time. To get to the root of our questions today, I'm speaking to Catherine Arnold, expert in English and psychology, and the author of Bedlam, London, and it's Mad. Let's get into it. Thank you so much for joining me betwixt the sheets today, historian extraordinaire Catherine Arnold.

It's wonderful to have you here. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure. We are talking about the history of mental health on this episode and that is something that you have researched. I absolutely loved your book on the history of Bedlam, London and it's mad. It's fabulous. So you are the ideal person to talk to us about the history of madness and in particular the history of Bedlam.

So I'll start there and say, what is Bedlam? Well, Bedlam, I mean, to start off with, Bedlam's a word, isn't it? You know, you say, I went to Ikear and it was Bedlam. We went to the sales and it was Bedlam and it's actually Bethlehem, which means House of Bread in Hebrew. And it's a religious foundation organized by the Christians. Bedlam, as we know it, as a hospital started around about the 11th century in London. And it was founded by people who've been on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and come back with the idea of founding a hospital. Because in those days, hospitals were always religious institutions.

there wasn't kind of a secular version of hospitals back then. So it started off as far as you can get, a mainstream hospital in 11th, 12th century, London. And it took in everybody. It was an asylum in the real sense of the word as in a safe place where people could go. So it took in people with physical disabilities and people with mental problems. So across the board then. Yeah, across the whole spectrum. And then it gradually, over the years,

years changed into a place that specialised in mental health. There's two things. First of all, there was a hospital for people with mental problems elsewhere in London, and it was closed down by one of the kings, because he reckoned that the noise from what he called, that mad people was upsetting his falcons. That's outrageous. All the poor mad people were taken from the hospital where they'd been

and kind of incorporated with the existing Bethelum or Bedlam. A note on that name, yes, it's Bethlehem correctly, but in Cockney, in London, in Estuary, it soon becomes Bedlam. And that's the name that sticks with it. And obviously because it's a reputation of being somewhere noisy and crazy, hence we have this modern word, Bedlam. Somewhere that upset the Falcons, apparently. Yeah, I mean, you know, talk about NIMBY.

So basically, you know, by the 16th century, for instance, Bedlam was taking in people with mental problem. Another thing we have to remember is at that point, they didn't have DSM-4, they didn't have kind of a classification of mental disorders. No, no, not at all. The medical terminology of the day, you could be considered mad if, for instance,

you had Down syndrome, you were on the autistic spectrum, you had learning disabilities, you were female, you were left-handed, you had epilepsy, anything really where you've felt, between the cracks where you won't consider to be kind of a normal person. It's sounding less and less like somewhere that you'd go to be healed.

There's a lot of danger in that, isn't there, about, well, who's mad? Well, yeah, there's two sides to it. On the one side, looking back at that particular period of history, it wasn't the norm to keep so-called mad people out of society. Unless you were really a danger to people, unless you were obviously sort of homicidal, you just lived with everybody else. People who've got ex-interestities or problems,

as long as they're not dangerous, they're tolerated, they're part of society. So it was a way of kind of incorporating them and looking after them. But it was also good for families, because you'd have families who perhaps got one person who was seeing things, having fits, desperately unhappy. And these families, with money from the church, could say, please can you look after Arthur because we just can't take it anymore? or please can you look after Patricia because we're at our Witsend.

So it was somewhere where people could go and be looked after. The problem was that quite often, at various times in its history, Bedlam had institutionalised bullying and cronies and bad treatment. So you'd have a legendary guy who was a porter, like a hospital porter, but he was more in, he was in charge of sort of all the services. so people would donate funds so that they could go straight to the patients. And this particular porter would just take them all himself. At one point, he was running a kind of informal pub in there.

In the hospital? Yeah, in the hospital. That's unbelievable. What we know about mental health and hospitals and security today, just somebody setting up a pub, that's just wild. The kind of people who dropped in were sort of gypsies, tramps and thieves, I use the term advisedly, beggars, people who mutilated their children for money, you know, the usual kind of crew.

So it must have been terrible to have been a patient in there, to have been lying on your bed of straw, thinking, right, my mom's going to send me a cake and some beer, and then see these bastards have got hold of instead of you. That's, it's appalling. That's, oh my goodness. There were regular clearouts. George the Porter and his ilk were done for it.

But all through its history, there are pockets of, this institutionalised depravity. The Porter incident was around about the 15th century. Like a lot of institutions, Bedlam, had a clear out, bought new people in, but then again, it didn't take long before it fell back into its old ways. I mean, this is what always happens. You've got vulnerable patients. You've got charity as a source of income. And that charity doesn't always go to the right people. Like today, if you go to hospital, NHS or private, you get your own bed, hopefully you get food, you get services. But in those days, your relatives had to bring everything in for you. So they had to come and visit you with food. And if someone's nick in it?

Yeah, and then it gets nicked. Oh. So how did they understand mental health in the earliest days of the hospital? I mean, like you mentioned the classifications that we have now, but did they understand it in spiritual terms, like demons possession, that kind of thing? They had two ways of looking at it basically. First of all, they've got the classical approach derived from the Greeks and the Romans. And these were based on people like Hippocrates and Iscalapius, who had in some ways quite progressive ideas about what mental and physical health could be. And in some ways, these were the basis of modern medicine. Then they got this other view that you were influenced by the humours, that the humours were four tendencies,

Pheoric, bilious, melancholy and I think sanguine was the other. Four humours which kind of corresponded to the seasons and to other parts of the natural world. And if, for instance, you're melancholy, perhaps you needed to be leached. You needed to have leeches suck your blood out to even up the humours in your body. Who wouldn't want to be leached when they're feeling a bit mild?

I actually took part in a program, I'm filming a program a few years ago at a hospital museum and we had this jar of leeches on the counter in front of us and these leeches were trying to climb out. So these kind of medieval ideas of treatment led to things like leeches, the idea that possibly if you're manic, you'd be calm down if you had mustard plasters put on you.

You'd have your head shaved and these plasters would be applied to cool you down or you'd be leached. But all this, believe it or not, was quite benign. The other side of it, unfortunately, came from Christianity. It came from the church. And it was the idea that if you're mentally ill, you're possessed by demons. And so with this came the idea that the demons had to be beaten out of you. Give me a mustard patch any day.

That's not sounding helpful at all. It wasn't helpful at all. So the church had done some good things in that it had the idea of setting up hospitals and arms houses, it still go after people. But at the same time, it categorised people with mental illness as basically being possessed by devils. So you could be exercised or you could be beaten. Another idea was that you would benefit as a so-called mad person from being kept in the dark. Oh, okay.

Up until the 18th century one writer believed that people with mental health problems didn't feel hot or cold the way normal people did. And so they could be hosed down with cold water. What was it they thought was happening when they did that? They felt as if the demons were being beaten out of you. They viewed it as a form of exorcism. And unfortunately, in some parts of the world, this is still prevalent. As a folk belief, individuals or churches still believe that people are mentally possessed and it can have some terrible outcome sometimes effectively murder.

I mean the legacy of that belief is profound then, isn't it? It is. And I think it's what leads to the shame and guilt that surrounded mental illness for up until the last 50 years. You know, there are still people now. One of the primary factors of people not coming forward for help with mental health issues is that they feel somehow guilty or a shame. They think, well, I should just pull myself together. Or, you know, there are worse people off than me. you know, I've got a nice house, what am I worrying about? So guilt and shame about mental health has become part of the outlook in the West.

It's hard to get away from it. I mean, let alone, if you go back hundreds of years when people thought it was some kind of possession or what was on offer was being leached in a dark room with a mustard patch on your head and then hose down and have your sandwiches stolen by the orderly? pretty tough. I mean, it makes the NHS look really good. As it is, of course.

Doesn't it? Just. So these are the treatments that are on offer and they're not great. Do I dare hold out any more hope for the kind of conditions that people were kept in? Well, the conditions were still pretty shitty

and I used the word advisedly up until Shakespeare's Day. Because Bedlam at that point was just sort of a ramshackle hovel. It was an old building. it was in what we'd now considered to be the city of London, in that very small area that's now the financial district. So it wasn't great. It had an open drain running through the middle.

It had capacity for about 16 to 20 patients. Most people were put in there because their families were at their wits end or nobody else knew what to do with them. But of course, it was at that point that it became of interest to certain people. so Shakespeare himself may have visited. There's a garden near Bedlam, sort of botanical garden, where herbs were gathered. As they are now, herbs were helpful for mental illness.

But it's probable that he would have visited just because it was a freak show and because it was somewhere people used to go. So just members of the public could just visit? Yeah. So ostensibly, I mean, we have to be careful with this because it ended officially in the late 18th century. Around Shakespeare's time, he and his fellow playwrights could have said,

well, you know, we've had a few jars, let's go and visit Bedlam. And of course, there are scenes in Elizabethan and Jacobian plays set in Madhouses. I think it's the Duchess of Malfi. Yes, yeah, she goes round the twist, didn't she? But it became sort of an interesting place to go. And this had, again, a double use because certainly by the 18th century, inviting people in to visit was a way of raising funds. Of course it was, yes.

In its later incarnation, when you went to visit Bedlam Hospital, when it was a lovely palatial 18th century building modeled on Versailles, there would be a sign saying, you know, please give some money to the poor lunatics. And a thing like a collection box with a picture of, with a porter in his blue uniform that you put your pennies into, And these would go to propping up the hospital because, of course, this is in the days before any kind of state funding or hospitals were charities. You're kind of in a double bind there, aren't you?

Because it's, I'm going to assume that at the time some people were questioning whether or not this is morally okay to do. But it raises the funds, doesn't it? Yeah. Dean Swift, Swift, the Anglo-Irish poet, visited in 1710, and he found it rather a dismal sight. so did another poet who just thought it was outrageous that people were exhibited in this fashion and in the end paying to visit in that way was restricted by about the 1770s.

Do you think we've ever moved past wanted? Because I know that, you know, like you said, you can't pay your penny now to go and just wander around a mental health hospital, but I wonder sometimes when the amount of documentaries and things that are on TV, if we've ever really got past the I want to know, I want to see.

I don't think we have because a few years ago, when Big Brother first had, private eye described it in 18th century terms as the new Bedlam. A lot of these TV shows have kind of taken the place of Bedlam. I wonder what they were telling themselves when they were actually wandering around the hospital. Well, there was a guy called Ned Ward who ran, he was a publican, and he ran kind of a version of the evening standard or the Metro. and he wrote in his magazine, his newspaper, about how he was appalled, by the way people turned out to go to Bedlam. And he said, you know, it's nothing but a place for loiteras. You go there, you see people picking each other up.

You see pickpockets. You see the public paying money for the poor lunatics in their cells to ball out ballads or they get them drunk on gin and laugh at them. It was pretty coruscating. That's, it's just horrific, isn't it? And it's, so, I mean, if you weren't being paraded in front of a room full of gawking drunk tourists, effectively, what were the conditions, because I've read things that, like, there were cases of people being chained to a wall for years? Yes, that was the case of William Norris, who is a Marine, he was American, and he'd been arrested for murder. He was kept chained up for years

and there are pictures of him in the newspapers at the time chained so that he can't move. It was in the days before the chemical cosh and he was violent. He did attack a couple of warders. But he eventually died of basically burst intestines because he was so constipated. Oh my God.

He was being chained to a wall all that time. William Norris was one of the stories that was used by reformers to educate readers and to show just how bad bedlam had got. There was also another case of a young girl called Hannah Heisen, whose father tried to get her out of there. When he went to see her, she was almost unconscious, naked on a bed of straw. She'd been hosed down with cold water. She was pretty bad before she went in, but by the time he got to her, she'd lost her mind. So he and his wife rescued her, but she died.

So this is a flip side. You see, what had happened is that there had been a public outcry about the visits to Bedlam, people being allowed to loiter in the galleries and look at people in Gorp. This had stopped. So a family of doctors called the Monroe's had taken over and become the medical superintendents. And the Monroe's were very old-fashioned. they were what we would call now skeptical about any attempts to recover from mental illness.

Well, they sound ideal. Yeah. Their response was just to lock people up and throw away the key. Wow. And much worse things happened once Bedlam was sealed off. There's far more in the way of corruption and bullying than they'd probably gone on when people could go in and see what was happening.

There's an irony to that, isn't there? Is that once it's locked away and the people aren't visiting, it just allows worse abuses to happen. And if you think those are the case, the poor guy with his intestines and that poor girl, they're the ones that we know about. Exactly. I'll be back soon with Catherine to discuss more about London's mental health.

But was there reform? I mean, there must have been, it's not still there. Sort of over time, there were doctors who tried to improve things. They were medical superintendents from the 17th century. onwards, who came in and attempted to reform Bedlam. One of the best was William Hood, who came in about 1850s. Hood was progressive. He'd listened to the Quakers, the religious body.

They had an expert in the name of Tewke. And Tewke believed that what patients needed was not being whipped and leached and locked in the dark. What they needed was someone. to appeal for the inherent good in them because the Quakers believe that everybody's got good in them. And they needed what was called moral treatment. Now, that doesn't mean moral in the modern word of, you know, being moral or immoral.

It meant sort of appealing to their souls saying, look, I'm going to treat you well. Perhaps you can respond in a more humane fashion. And so Hood and two believed that patients should be warm, they should be clean, they should have sheets, They should have a decent dinner in the evening with wine and a few grains of opium. And he believed that was a far better way of treating the so-called insane than the barbaric treatment that had gone on before.

That just sounds like just perfect common sense to our modern ears. Like, well, of course that's, but was he met with resistance about that? Were there people? Yeah, there was tremendous resistance from other so-called mad doctors. You know what medicine is like? There are always people who have new ideas in physical medicine and in mental health. There are always people who say, well, why don't we do it like this? Let's try this.

Let's look at these treatment pathways. And then there will always be older, more experienced professionals who feel threatened and say, no, no, we can't possibly do that. We've always beaten them and whipped them and locked them in the dark. Why are you coming along with all these new ideas of giving them wine and opium and food? The older doctors had their status to protect. Mad doctors, as they were called, made an amazing amount of money out of their specialism. In addition to working in places like Bedlam, they would have all run private madhouses,

which were quite often places where wealthy people, so they're difficult to handle awkward wives or troublesome daughters. See, I've read about this as well, that that seems to, I don't know how common that was, but it seems to crop up is that a family or a husband get hold of a doctor and go, I think, oh, I think she's gone a bit, you know, she's a bit mad. And that's all it takes and then she's locked up. And unfortunately, not so much here where it's quite difficult to get somebody sectioned. You basically need a doctor, possibly a police officer.

You need people in positions of authority to certify that somebody has to be locked up. But in the States, we hear of numerous times where people can just have. have their children sent away up until recently. You could have your children committed to a private insane asylum if they were gay. No. Yeah, the abuses of mental health that go on in the United States because it's all private. It's behind closed doors again. For insurance purposes, they'll slap a label on you,

so they'll say you're bipolar or schizophrenic or whatever. But it becomes kind of a tool of manipulating people. It becomes a form of social control. and something similar was going on in the 18th and 19th century where you've got men particularly who wanted to get rid of troublesome wives because even though the wives may still be alive in the asylums they could then go off and do whatever they liked do whatever they wanted Mr Rochester we're talking to you

they could get their hands on their wives money that's just it's too easy isn't it it's too open to abuse that one so those it's not looking too great in bed time so far but I'm wondering if you had lots of money. I'm thinking of George the third, the madness of King George. He wouldn't have been treated in Bedlam, would he? What kind of

treatment would he have received from his physician? He was very well treated. So there's a lot of speculation about what was actually wrong with George the third. To us, it might seem as if he had a nervous breakdown because he lost the colonies, which was a pretty big deal

in those days. That'd do it. Yeah, exactly. He may have been bipolar. There's speculation. the family suffered from a disease called Porphyria. Poor old George, even by the standards of the 18th century, his mood swings and his despair were desperate. He was fortunate because his family wanted to help. Nobody wanted the King of England to be mad and incapable of government,

but sometimes he was, and that's why everything had to be handed over to the Prince Regent, who was spectacularly bad in managing the country's affairs. But there were various attempts to deal with, with George's madness. And some of these were cruel and barbaric. Some of the doctors he saw used some of the treatments I've already described.

But then along came Willis, who was a celebrated society doctor, and he used a form of the moral treatment. He attempted to kind of rationalise with George to tell him, I know that you're suffering, but you need to behave. You need to behave in a reasonable way.

You're the king. We can't go on like this. It's not exactly pull yourself together, but you have to realise the consequences of your action, which is very much the moral treatment. And it's not hitting him with sticks? No, but it is. If George really goes off on one,

the straight jacket comes along. Wow. That's okay. He was really poorly then, wasn't he? Oh, he was. He was. He made a recovery, and the whole nation celebrated there as a service at St. Paul's Cathedral. but like many people who have been severely mentally ill,

there's always the prospect that he would lapse back into it. Of course. It's difficult. You can't really diagnose somebody from a historical perspective. It doesn't stop us trying though. It's very trendy. But it's strange because in many ways he was a kind and benevolent sort of person and nothing illustrates that better than when in one of his more lucid periods,

George was out and about and I think he was just about to go into St James's Palace in central London, just down from Piccadilly now and he stops his carriage and a woman comes towards him with what looks like a petition so George is oh, have a look at this

and his bodyguards are, you know, wait, wait, hang on we don't know who this woman is. So she comes forward like this and it seems as if she's got a petition. And George says, you know, because he is a bit passionate, you know, what is it, my lady, woman, what can I do for you? And at that point, where she looks like she's going to hand over a petition, she reaches into her pocket and she pulls out a dessert knife.

Oh dear, okay. So immediately she's seized by the guards and carted off to bedlam. She's strip search because they think she might actually be a man dressed up in an attempt to get close to George and murder him, assassinate him. But when he sees what's going on, George doesn't say, you know, get her to the tower, knock her down, have her handcuffed. He says, oh, this woman is obviously mad, please be gentle to her. So she's taken off to Bedlam and it emerges that she's highly delusional.

She's had a terrible life. She's had a series of failed relationships. She's a failed seamstress who's lost all her money. But she's always had a delusion somehow. She is part of the royal family and she should be on the throne of England. And when she's taken to Bedlam, she says, well, I want to see the king immediately. But she's lucky to reach Bedlam at a time when the leadership there was very positive. So she was treated.

She stayed at Bedlam for the rest of her life. She was allowed to have snuff. She was allowed to have writing instruments in her room in her cell. Okay. But she never recounted from her position that she was one of the rightful rulers of the country. Wow. But her treatment and George's attitude, it's really touching, isn't it, that he could empathise with that? Yeah, it really is.

But it sounds quite progressive. So is there a sort of a sense by that time things are starting to change? And how have they changed? Because the original Bedlam Hospital was eventually closed down and is now, is it the Royal Bethlehem? Yes, it's now the Royal Bethlehem. Yeah. Well, what happened was it went through various incarnations.

So the most recent version of it in Central London is now the Imperial War Museum. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. So if you go, as I have, to the Imperial War Museum, and you look around behind the scenes, it's built on a hospital plan because that's what you see. to be. Subsequently, part of the organisational arm of it went to the Maudsley in South London, and then a separate campus was built out in the suburbs, which is where you'd go now if you

visited it. And the campus version that was arrived at in the 1920s, it's like going to an old-fashioned university. There's lots of sort of low buildings. It's where the museum is, and I can't recommend the Bedlam Museum highly enough. They've got all sorts of fascinating stuff, And they've also got some old documentation so you can go through the old records of who was admitted and why, which make fascinating reading. I bet it does.

Was there many famous patients through those doors that they have records? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there'd always been one or two famous people over the years, but the Victorian era, you know, the best known patients are people like Richard Dad, who is a famous painter. There was Louis Wayne, the cat painter.

and there's a woman called Antonia White, who is a novelist. One of Antonio White's novels, you've actually got a record of what it's like being a patient and a fictionalised bedlam. That's fascinating. It is absolutely extraordinary because Antonio White was there in the 1920s after a failed love affair. And the way she depicts Bedlam is almost like some kind of bizarre fantasy, where either because she's in a manic state or because she's somehow totally lost her grip on reality. She's really tripping out,

so you can't quite tell what's going on. But from time to time, she's taken off and put into cold baths and she becomes so thin from her breakdown that her wedding ring falls off. But the oddest bit of all is when she's just starting to recover and she looks out of her cell window and she can see that she's in Lambeth.

She looks out of the window and she thinks, my God, it's like the prisoner. I'm in central London. And there's a red bus going past. And that adds to the kind of really odd quality of unreality that surrounds her whole incarceration. She's walking in the exercise yard with some of the other patients. And she listens to them talking and she suddenly realizes she's the only sane person there. Well, that's, it feels really disjointed even hearing you describe that. Yeah.

And tell me about Richard Dad, the artist. Oh, Richard Dad is an extraordinary story. He was a very talented painter in the 19th century. But fairly early on, he showed signs, symptoms of what we would call paranoid psychosis. And he went for a walk with his father and his father didn't come back. And it emerged that he'd murdered his father. And then he'd jumped on a packet. steamer to France. He was arrested in France, brought back to England. He'd been delusional. He'd thought

his father was the devil. But he was lucky to receive very enlightened treatment under Dr. William Hood, who was then the superintendent, who said, right, well, he's obviously a danger to other people, but there's no reason why he can't have all his materials. He'd been to the Royal Academy. He was a very accomplished painter. So he was allowed to carry on with his career as a painter inside. in Bedlam and he came up with this extraordinarily sort of bizarre pre-Raphaelite stuff. His most famous painting is called the Fairy Fellas Masterstroke. And it's a really hypnotic, hallucogenic painting of fairies and elves and creatures. And then sitting in the middle is a little shriveled up little old man who looks a bit like

Charles Darwin. And then there's a huge guy with an axe who seems to be about to hit. the little old man on the head. So it seems to me as if it's got some reference to him to his patricide of his father. Of course. He was kept in what was known as a criminal wing

at Bedlam, where they kept the so-called criminal lunatics. And then when Broadmoor opened in the 1860s, he was transferred over there. Okay. Louis Wayne, the Catman, has recently been out, there's been a marvellous film about it which I saw a couple of months ago

with Benedict Cumberbatch. Louis Wayne was a painter. He was very gifted and he developed a line of sort of comedy cats, but he was also suffering from severe mental illness. It's hard to define now. You can't diagnose in retrospect, but possibly he was bipolar. He had a lot of family tragedies, a lot of devastating loss. And he was eventually so bad that he was sectioned to a really rough kind of mainstream mental hospital. And he had no money because he'd never kept a copyright on all his famous cat paintings. And when people heard that he was in such a bad way and he was in this really basic prison-like mental hospital,

a public subscription was started basically a fundraiser to get him into bedlam where he could be looked after better. And he was. And he was able to have much better conditions and do his painting there and have much better quality of life. That's a very hopeful story. Yeah, this was in the days before the national health and before you could be put into a decent mental hospital. It's so interesting to hear this. And what do you think the legacy of all this is?

Because there's so much darkness there and abuse and power. But there's also these stories of hope that spring up, that we can do things differently. What do you think is the legacy of Bedlam? I mean, one of the problems with mental health at the moment It's not enough money's put into it. What is it? Something like one in ten psychiatrists posts are empty at the moment.

Nobody wants to become a psychiatrist. If you want to be a psychotherapist, there isn't enough funding. You have to fund yourself for training unless you're very lucky. So there's a huge mental health problem in this country, but not enough people who either want or are able to fill the roles. You know, there's a desperate crying need for help. But the positive side, is that the good people who come out of bed,

and William Hoods, for instance, the man who treated Richard Dad, the original Dr. Tewke, who founded the retreat at York, which is still going strong, there are lots of people who do want to do good, and there are lots of people who are understanding that, thank God, that we all know

that mental health is no longer something that has to be knocked out of you with a stick. You know, we don't have to shut people in dark cellars and throw water on them. So that there's been some degree of education And also I think over the last 30 years, certainly during my lifetime, there's become more of an acceptance of people having mental health problems. So you've now got, you know, Prince Harry and Stephen Fry,

various people talking openly about their problems in a way that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. There is hope, but what it really needs is more funding to train people at every level. Funding more resources. being made available and for people to keep talking, I suppose. Yeah, for people to keep talking about, you know, for every ruby wax, there is still probably somebody sitting in a bedroom in Notting and thinking, oh, I don't know.

If I talk about this, people will think I'm funny because there is still an inherent sense of guilt and shame, which is quite ridiculous. And people need to know that there's help out there and there's hope for them. Absolutely. And on that note, I couldn't have put that better myself, But thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, Catherine Arnold. It's a pleasure to be between the sheets with you. Thank you. Thank you.

I hope that you've enjoyed this episode and thank you so much to our guest, Catherine Arnold. If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. In the next few weeks, we've got episodes on sex toys, vasectomies and so much more. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.