Child Mental Health Care: Hidden Truth Revealed

Conspiracy theories are all very well, but many of them lack credibility and can often be dismissed by looking sensibly at the evidence.  Were the moon landings faked?  Unlikely.  Those who believe they were may well have considered the evidence, but their interpretation of it has been coloured by rumour and suspicion.  Much the same can be said of those who believe the US Government staged the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. 

Such conspiracy theories assume there is a concealed truth, that someone is deliberately hiding something from the public gaze.  And there are, in fact, many things that are hidden from the public gaze.  But occasionally fragments of fact that slip out.

This is certainly case when it comes to mental health care. In the past, people with mental health problems – and even people simply imagined to have mental health problems – were removed to isolated asylums.  Once there, they were ‘out of sight, out of mind’.  Most people, of course, would have known that these asylums existed, but they wouldn’t have known – or wanted to know – what happened at these places. 

By the latter part of the 20th century, these asylums (now known as psychiatric hospitals) were more visible than they used to be – though what went on inside them was still largely hidden.  But one type of mental institution that remained unknown to most people was the children’s psychiatric unit.  This may not have been a deliberate conspiracy, but that hardly matters to the children who were admitted to such places.

My novel, Delivered Unto Lions, is about revealing the hidden existence of these institutions and what happened in them.  Back in the 1970s, I was unfortunate enough to become a patient in a children’s unit of this kind in Somerset, England (due to depression).  Before I ended up there, I had never heard of the place, and I was surprised to learn later that very few others had heard of it either.

When things are hidden away they take on a special kind of power.  Because of the stigma that still persists in connection with mental health, few former child patients are willing to speak out about what happened to them, and few parents will want to be reminded that a child of theirs was taken away from them and placed in such an institution.  And so the hidden past can continue to control the present. 

Delivered Unto Lions seeks to uncover something of the past treatment of emotionally disturbed children.  There was physical and psychological abuse, and powerful psychoactive drugs were often used in a punitive way.  All this was hidden away, largely unknown to the families and friends of the children who suffered.  That’s not to say that the people involved in caring for disturbed children – nurses, psychiatrists, therapists, etc. – were bad people.  Apart from a few exceptions, most of them were caring and dedicated.  But terrible things still happened. 

In Delivered Unto Lions I adopt a ‘fictionalised’ narrative approach to the issue.  This is to present an accessible, readable story; to protect identities; to fill the odd gap in my memory; and to enable particular themes to be drawn out – themes of hidden truth, of a child’s powerlessness, of institutional callousness, and of the impact of genuine kindness in an often thoughtless environment.

While my book cannot be described as literally true (though a lot of it is very close), I believe it is representative of the truth.  And so I want my book to push at a door and open it just wide enough for the truth to come through.  If that can happen, I hope that it will have a liberating effect – in whatever modest way – for children past and present.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.  It is available from Amazon and all good online booksellers, and can also be ordered from many local bookshops.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu