Of Unsound Mind: Walkington's Broadgate Hospital
(first published in Around the Wolds and North Yorkshire, April 2005)


Although the subject of mental ill-health is often seen by many as a taboo subject the fact remains that one in four people will, at some point in their lives, suffer a mental health problem. The mother with post-natal depression, a young woman with eating disorders, the disruptive school pupil with behavioural problems, the elderly patient ravaged by Alzheimer's disease or the victim of a car accident suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are only a few examples of those who suffer mental ill-health. While in the 21^st century 'Community Care' is the preferred option of helping the mentally ill, the systems and methods used in the past were far different. Throughout the later nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth, institutional care was predominant in the field of mental health. To this end a new East Riding asylum was built on land at Broadgate Farm near Walkington and opened in 1871………..

Writes Martin Limon

The term mental illness can refer to disorders that might range from those which cause mild distress to those that can seriously damage a person's ability to function in even the most routine aspects of life. Symptoms of mental illness range in severity from a panic attack (heart palpitations and rapid breathing) to schizophrenia where those afflicted might hear voices inside their head. Like so many other aspects of medicine, progress in treating those with mental health problems remained painfully slow until recent times. Doctors in the 18^th and 19^th centuries might use crude devices like the swivel chair to treat mental illness. This was used to spin a depressed patient at high speed in the forlorn hope that this would re-arrange the content of his or her brain into the right position.

To calm those with manias  baths were considered to have sedative properties while cold showers were used to treat those with melancholia (depression). Although such methods may have distracted patients momentarily they did not offer any real
relief.

Although the 18^th century saw the development of some private asylums to house people with mental health problems (like one provided by the Quakers at York in 1796) it was not until 1845 that state provision of lunatic asylums became compulsory. This led to the building of a joint asylum for North and East Yorkshire at Clifton, York in 1847. However within twenty years the rising cost of this asylum, to East Riding taxpayers, led to plans for a separate institution. In 1865 advertisements appeared in local newspapers stating that land was needed to build a new East Riding Lunatic Asylum.