Art and Madness

I was most marked on my visit to the Bethlem Royal Hospital by its collection of paintings and poetry, works by twentieth-century patients at the hospital. Click here to see Bethlem's online art gallery. I was expecting a historical exhibition of Bethlem only, so it was surprising and moving to see the personal experience of mental illness portrayed in art. One poem, “The Enemy Without,” was by an anorexic patient and emphasizes the distance between her and her caretakers’ view of her illness:

Oh you think that life is precious and you fight to keep me breathing
Yet you hold me nearer death than the life that I am living.
Don’t think that I am sad for all the living I am losing,
I am not crying but for pain that comes from all my being.
Allow me to break free of the chains in which you bind me
And I will find freedom in the silence of my death.

Poems like this as well as paintings reminded me of the personal, emotional—the human side—of the story of Bethlem. There some paintings of children whose gray drawn faces and dull black sockets drew you in to the experience of depression.

This aspect of Bethlem could have been easily lost among the facts of its four different locations, its visiting policies of the eighteenth century that gave rise to the human zoos of “Bedlam,” and its consequent reforms in the nineteenth century. But with this display of art (and with our examination of a nineteenth patient’s “file”), Bethlem showed great sensitivity to the experience of mental illness in an institutional setting. Perhaps the lingering stereotype of “Bedlam” encourages the hospital now to treat its patients, past and present, with especial compassion.
The art was displayed in a smaller room that also housed the museum’s historical artifacts, including the statues of Melancholia and Mania that used to adorn the hospital’s gate, some of the leather and iron restraints used on patients, photographs of former sites, and a copy of William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, in which two ladies twitter behind a fan as they gawk at the vice-ridden patients, struck mad as punishment after years of debauchery. Though the reality of 18th century Bethlem was better than the stereotype of Bedlam, the horror of what it must have been like was illustrated by juxtaposition of patients’ inner lives, as shown in their art, with the instruments of treatment used on patients like them in earlier centuries.