Remembering Whitchurch

In this photo, Whitchurch Hospital looked so beautiful on a summer’s day. Originally built in 1904, during the Edwardian era, the building was previously named the Cardiff City Asylum, or Cardiff City Mental Hospital (historical records differ on the name).

According to genealogical accounts, Whitchurch Hospital was used as the site of the Welsh Metropolitan War Hospital from 1915 to 1919, and as the Cardiff Royal Infirmary War Emergency Hospital from 1940 to 1945.

I never witnessed such pleasant views at Whitchurch. What I remember, from my brief stay within its walls in the autumn of 1994, is a place devoid of colour, of breath, and of Hope itself. I remember the greyness of the prison-like wards, the deathly chill of the wide hallways, the dauntingly high ceilings, the worn and faded furniture in the day rooms, and the sounds – the sounds!

Night and day, the incessant pacing of lost and restless souls along the dark corridors, unable to sleep, and powerless to wake from their internal nightmares. Night and day, the muted mumblings of a multitude of patients - or should I say inmates? – conducting their eternal one-way conversations, their sad soliloquies. In the background, you can always hear someone crying, someone screaming, someone laughing. And then there are those who say nothing at all, staring into a space only they can see, and contemplating alternate realities.

I’ve lost count of the hours I spent watching the dancing shadows, cast by the leaves from the surrounding trees, acting out imaginary dramas on the lifeless walls. I remember the intense feelings of helplessness after every one of my ‘therapy’ sessions with the doctors, who wore inscrutable masks, and who jotted down their diagnoses on faded yellow papers as detachedly as judges. I detested the inefficacy of the medicines, which did little more than made us breathing vegetables, incapable of thought or expression. Most of all, I recall the great fear of not ever being able to walk out of the place, to be allowed again among the sane and the harmless, because, unlike ordinary patients, we could not just simply sign indemnity forms and discharge ourselves. We were held, against our will, within Whitchurch’s walls, bound by our common curse.

When did I start to acquire my strange compulsions, to lose track of and interest in the passage of time? When did I commence my attempted exit from the business of Life altogether, to withdraw into a world so private, it cannot be described in words? I do not know. And just as I do not recall falling ‘ill’, I do not recall my journey to recovery. Because the great truth is this – one never really recovers; one just learns to pass for normal. You learn to say the right things, or say nothing. You teach yourself behavioural cues, and learn to reign in all your eccentricities. When you have successfully done this, you will be ‘cured’.

One good thing did come out of my visit to Whitchurch. I made a promise to myself to never again allow any evidence of impairment to justify another incarceration in any such institution again. It’s like a left-hander learning to write with the right hand – it requires patience, determination, and motivation.

Whitchurch continues to motivate me to this day, even though it is no longer a mental hospital, its faculties having been deemed to be inadequate to meet the needs of psychiatric treatment in the 21st century.

A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. ~ Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942

“I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell

I know, right now you can't tell

But stay awhile and maybe then you'll see

A different side of me.

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little impaired

I know, right now you don't care

But soon enough you're gonna think of me

And how I used to be – Me.”

“Unwell” – Matchbox 20