Bedlam Mental Hospital

Bethlem Gallery & Museum

Today we took a trip to Bethlem Gallery & Museum to research and have a better understanding of mental health issues, the type of people that effects and how. 

The Museum was built to commemorate the hospital of the same name. Bethlem Royal Hospital was founded in 1247 and was the first institution in the entire UK to specialise in the care of the mentally ill. 

The museum tries to cater for collective archives ,art and historic objects to support the history of mental healthcare and the treatment of it.


The World Health Organisation defines mental health as 'a state well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community'.

Looking around the gallery I saw that the hospital wasn't only made for the benefit of helping people who were diagnosed as mentally ill; it was also a destination for visitors to explore inside and would actually qualify as a sight of London for the visitors.



On the left, is a painting made by Charlotte Johnson Wahl called 'It Has Not Worked'. It can be assumed that by this she meant that the treatment she had received at Bethlem Hospital 'had not worked'. It is interesting that she has chosen to make a comment on this through her creativity.This links back to the idea that there can be a link between creativity and 'madness' which is the very link that we are trying to explore. I think it is interesting that she has her hands turned to the viewer as if to show that she herself is useless and helpless similar to the treatment that she has been offered at Bethlem.




On the right there is a painting made by Kim Noble called 'Coming or Going Man'. The point of the painting appears to be that the man is feeling lost and unsettled and in its most literal sense not knowing whether you're coming or going. Its interesting that she chose to pain the man alone on the canvas. This to me, suggests at his vulnerability and isolation.




At the museum I eventually came across a straitjacket. ( to the left)
Straitjackets, to me, are items that I would have before associated with mental illness due to its presence in media and film. It was quite interesting that standing next to the straitjacket made me feel really saddened and a bit disgusted in the way that this would have been used to physically restrain a person. On the TV or film or theatre it had never felt wrong to see a person restrained by a straitjacket however standing next to real- life one made me feel quite horrible.


I expected the museum to be very different from what it actually was. When we arrived, I was surprised to find that the doctors that had worked there, all that time ago, did in fact try their best to help the 'patients'. I had previously been told that poor mental health wasn't ever an illness that people attempted to cure or make any better, back then, so I was quite shocked to see that although their methods were sometimes a bit harsh or could be called controversial, they were all utilized in order to help the patients that were detained there.

I got the impression that a lot of the patients had at some point felt a sense of loneliness or isolation due to the number of accounts and paintings that suggest this. Although this was something that was already obvious to me, it definitely had a larger impact on me to actually see work produced by the mental patients that portrayed their real feelings and how their mental health made them feel.