Lennox Castle Hospital: a hidden history (2/4) 

That poor man whose father abandoned him. Truly heartbreaking. 😞 I worked in the mens Villa for six weeks and that was enough for me. I decided to go back to school to do a fifth year. It was a cattle market. There was a male ‘patient’ (‘Patients’ is what everyone called them) sitting naked from the waist down, playing with himself and nothing was being done about it. I’d NEVER seen anything like it. Looking back now I feel terrible for them. I was able to walk out and go home like all the other workers, but they were stuck in there drugged up to the eyeballs. Imagine having to wear other people’s underwear and clothes too. FGS, we don’t know how lucky we are.

I have been a support worker for nearly 10 years now and most of my service users have came from the castle, there are a few i have worked with that should never have been there, having kids out of wedlock for example, and these young women were forced to stay there for up to 50 years. Most of them now will never ever have a normal life and to be honest most of them want to go back to the castle. institutionalisation is what happened to these poor people, never mind the constant sexual abuse which defo happened

I was born there in 55