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Long before I became a psychoanalytically-minded psychotherapist, I worked for a few months as a clinical psychologist at St Augustine's Hospital. I was therefore keen to read the account of this hospital provided in Asylum Years by Robert Hayward and Andrew Heenan, who became trainee nurses there in January 1972, a century after it was founded as a self-contained village with its own farm, workshops, baker, butcher, fire brigade, church, graveyard, gasworks, cricket team and band (Allen, 1990).
Vestiges of this communal life remained at St Augustine's Hospital when I worked there shortly before two nurses, Brian Ankers and Ollesté Weston, submitted to the area health authority criticism of the hospital on account of ‘ill treatment of patients’ living in its long-stay wards. After this criticism was dismissed as unwarranted Ankers and Weston ‘produced a second more detailed critique of the hospital, evidencing seventy instances of abuse, neglect and degrading treatment of patients’. This resulted in an official inquiry which confirmed that most of these instances had indeed occurred. Published in 1976, this inquiry also noted that, ‘across the hospital patients had been subject to mistreatment and malpractice’ against ‘a background of administrative and policy failings that destined the ward environment to be highly charged and often dangerous with few safeguards in place to protect both staff and patients’ (p. 38).
Having thus reported the inquiry's conclusions Hayward and Heenan criticise the inquiry itself for not failing to ‘take into account the voice of the patients’ (p. 57). In seeking to remedy this failure Hayward and Heenan devote more than a third of their book to what they describe as the forgotten patients' tales. Ironically, however, these tales scarcely include the voice of patients themselves. Instead Hayward and Heenan rest content with what they and their colleagues remember of various patients.
Examples include Bill, whom we learn spent much of his a