David Leslie - Carstairs: Hospital for Horrors

Though this be madness, yet there is method int.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet , Act II

I am indebted to the staff of the superb Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, in particular Colin Waller, for their help and their courtesy in allowing me access to records of Craig Dunain Hospital.

The British Journal of Psychiatry kindly granted me permission to use material from A Fifteen-Year Review of Female Admissions to Carstairs State Hospital by Patrick W. Brooks and Geoffrey Mitchell, which appeared on pages 4457 in the issue of November 1975 (No. 127).

My sincere thanks go to those former patients of the State Hospital who kindly told me of their experiences at and memories of Carstairs, while requesting anonymity and in one case overcoming great distress at certain recollections.

I am grateful also to Robert Mone, still in the custody of the Scottish Prison Service, for providing a series of statements relating to the incident in 1968 that resulted in his becoming a Carstairs patient, his knowledge of Thomas McCulloch and the events surrounding their escape in 1976. This is the first time that either man has voluntarily made public a precise account of the escape.

It is officially termed the State Hospital but to most it is simply Carstairs. That word alone is sufficient to send a shiver down the spine, because Carstairs is no ordinary hospital. It is effectively a prison holding the most seriously demented and dangerous men in our society, among them the perpetrators of hideous crimes. Some have psychiatric illnesses so deep-rooted that they are untreatable. All are there to protect them from us; and we from them. In short, it is a hospital for horrors.

The common image of Carstairs as a terrifying pit of evil where patients are subjected to torture and humiliation is one largely resulting from the refusal of successive managements to illustrate to the public who fund it precisely what goes on behind its barbed wire and bars. Secrecy is paramount. Officially, staff must never discuss their work. Some former patients believed that should it become known they had discussed their experiences, they would be hauled back inside, never to re-emerge. In compiling this story of Carstairs and the how and why it came into being, the State Hospital was invited to become the major contributor. It refused. Carstairs is akin to the very thing that it seeks to treat: the human brain an organ locked within a fortress refusing to give up the secrets of its working.

Carstairs: Hospital for Horrors tells the story of Scotlands State Hospital through the stories of the people that have been incarcerated there over the years. This book concentrates on the crimes which led to them being committed there, the challenges they pose for the State Hospital, the problems with security and the (often misguided) decisions to release them from the facility. The lack of cooperation from Carstairs in writing this book has meant that it is not possible to explore the treatments that are used at the facility or the security measures in as much detail as necessary. This secretive approach from Carstairs administrators discourages sympathy for its patients. And yet, tragically, sympathy and understanding are what patients need and deserve. For centuries, madness has been a condition largely regarded with sympathy even though the care of sufferers has lacked support. There was little or no discrimination between the varying degrees of severity of psychiatric illness, often simply the product of poverty, with the result that the afflicted were frequently simply left to mingle with the sane, void of treatment or help. Records held at the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness show how often seriously disturbed men and women were thrown together to sink in their despair or swim back to sanity.