The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care
Mental Health in Historical Perspective Series

This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often ?land grabbing? Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland.

Alice Mauger is a Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin. She has published on the history of psychiatry and medicine in Ireland, including in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Expands upon existing scholarship to explore the provision of mental healthcare for paying patients in Irish asylums

Compares the experiences of Irish paying patients with those of British patients in both private and public asylums

Examines the impact of class, socio-economics, religion and gender on patterns of committal, care and treatment

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras