50 years in an Asylum - poor woman

[familydar]

Chasing after Ancestry hints, today I've been going after some of the "outliers" and came across the sister-in-law of a 1st cousin 3x removed.  She was the second youngest (as far as I'm aware) of a brood of 11.  A single woman, she was admitted to a lunatic asylum just before Xmas 1908, at the age of 33.  She outlived nearly all her siblings and finally died there just under 50 years later.  So sad.

Jane :-)

[LizzieW]

My g.uncle was admitted to an asylum in 1907 and died there in 1964.  From the description on his entry page (I was only allowed to have the first 2 pages of his records and can have the rest in 2064 - when I'm 123!) it would seem he was probably schizophrenic.  My mum went to see him with her mum (g.uncle's sister) when mum was about 11 or so in the 1920s,  and she said he seemed perfectly normal and was doing the gardening in the grounds.  On the 1911 census he is described as "Lunatic".

So sad, he had no life apart from the asylum yet today, he would have had treatment and been out in the community.  I do have a photograph of him and all his siblings when he must have been about 12 or so and he does look a bit "vacant" on the photograph but he was a butcher for many years until his admission to the asylum.