Butterly, Lisa
(2014)
Institutional reform in mental healthcare in Ireland: the establishment of the Ardee
Mental Hospital, 1933, in its historical context.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
Institutional reform in mental healthcare started in the eighteenth century with the construction
of a small number of facilities in Dublin and Cork specifically for the treatment of mental illness.
The 1800s witnessed the construction of an extensive network of district lunatic asylums in two
phases: pre-Famine and post-Famine. The last major construction occurred in Portrane, County
Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century. The Ardee Mental Hospital, County Louth, opened
in November 1933. It was the only mental health facility constructed in the Irish Free State
period. Until this time, patients from County Louth were accommodated in the Richmond
District Lunatic Asylum in Dublin. This thesis argued that the Local Government (Ireland) Act
(1898) reinvented the political, economic and moral justifications for institutional reform in
mental healthcare and produced a new generation of mental health reformers in County Louth.
The efforts of members of Louth County Council and subsidiary councils in the first decades of
the twentieth century led, firstly, to official separation between the council and the Richmond
asylum authorities in 1930 and, secondly, to the construction of a purpose built mental hospital
on part of the Ruxton estate in Ardee. The Ardee Mental Hospital was an icon of modern mental
healthcare in twentieth-century Ireland which was examined in this research through a number of
historical contexts: politics (local government in County Louth), economics (the economics of
institutional mental health care), the unionisation of nurses in Irish mental hospitals (labour
history), the professionalisation of staff and advances made in the treatment of mental illnesses
(the rhetoric of mental healthcare in twentieth-century Ireland).
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Institutional reform; mental healthcare; Ireland; Ardee
Mental Hospital; 1933; historical context; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > History |
| Item ID: |
7716 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
11 Jan 2017 12:47 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Origin of downloads
Altmetric
Altmetric