Alan Gilsenan has filmed patients' lives as Portrane psychiatric hospital nears closure, but many raw stories will remain untold
One morning recently I drove out to the asylum at Portrane in north Co Dublin. It is a drive I have taken many times over the last year making The Asylum, a documentary series about life inside that infamous and much- maligned institution. I have been out of the country for some time and now, on returning, I find myself strangely excited to be returning once more to what is more properly known as St Ita's Psychiatric Hospital.
At the edge of the grounds, the early morning light falls upon the sea as the dog-walkers stride purposefully along the cliff walk overlooking Lambay Island - once mooted as a possible location for the psychiatric institution when it was first built in 1896.
When we were filming we would often begin our day down here, looking back from the beach to take a few dawn-lit shots of St Ita's imposing red-brick exterior. Locals from Donabate and Portrane - or the summer visitors from the caravans down among the dunes - would often recall their childhood holidays, playing by the sea and staring up towards those formidable and foreboding buildings. The children told each other jokes and scary stories about Portrane, while their parents issued phoney threats about ending up in there. For Portrane was - and perhaps still is - in its archetypal splendour, the madhouse, the looney bin, the funny farm.
Yet not so funny really. A dark place, full of lore and legend. A chrysalis, a sea chest of all our fears and our madness. Our unsung and inarticulate depths.
OVER THE LAST year, during the filming of The Asylum, we were aware that these were the dying days of Portrane. At its height, the institution had catered, in a largely self-sufficient manner, for up to 1,600 people - but it is now being slowly wound down. Most of the wards lie empty. And although the series deals with the wider constituency of the St Ita's service (which includes an Acute Admissions Unit on the grounds at Portrane and also an extensive community service, which stretches across north Co Dublin), these buildings at Portrane always seemed to be the heart of our documentary, as they have also been at the heart of the misunderstanding and neglect of mental health within the State.
I have always had a vague and irrational feeling that the final closure - so slow in coming - will happen silently in the night, and the next day all that will remain will be ghosts and fading memories. And this day, the empty corridors have that same elegiac quality.
I peer in the window of the eloquently named Unit One Female. It was here that Caroline, who seemed as old as the place itself, had poignantly sung One Day at a Time and the Portrane Song ("Your dancing days are over / And Portrane will be your doom"). Here also, Áine had asked me if I was Daniel O'Donnell. And I, not wanting to disappoint her, had said that I was. But this morning it is deserted and all that remains of the dozen or so ladies are a few lonely armchairs.
Where is everyone? Moved out into the community perhaps, wherever that is? Some private nursing home, perhaps?
The truth - as is so often the case - is more mundane than my imaginings. Unit One Female has been moved upstairs. (More light, a better paint job.) The lads in Unit Nine have been a bit slow getting shaved. It is a Saturday morning, after all.
We are there to take a few stills - photographs to illustrate the series in the press. Caroline, performing for the camera as always, seems happy to see us. "It's a madhouse," she said once to us: "St Ita's Madhouse." I always felt she just acted up for us - the poor lads trying to make a documentary - but then I remember her crying when she spoke of her mother's death or when we gave her some perfume for Christmas.
Across the ward, I see the shrunken figure of Tina. I squeeze her hand and say hello. Her slow, blinking eyes are gradually showing signs of Alzheimer's. Little did she know that she would end up here when she was handing out the smoked cod and chips in her Dublin chipper. But at least - unlike so many others - she has her husband Peadar coming to visit each day.
Down in Unit Nine, Kevin is acting the maggot as usual; he always makes me smile. Another man throws a lit cigarette at our photographer, Bernard Walsh, who, lost behind his lens, thankfully doesn't notice. And across the day-room sits George (not his real name), the first person I met when I first went to Portrane two years ago. George had been ill lately, but usually he is a Beckettian figure about the corridors, donning a stylish hat and dark overcoat. We had many chats, smoked many Majors, and filmed extensively with him, but recently he decided that he didn't wish to be on television, and we have honoured that. That was the deal: respect the autonomy of each person and allow them to change their minds, as many did.
But I will miss George from the film. I'll miss his stories of life as a merchant seaman, of adventures in Canada, his roguish romancing (of our researcher Anna Rodgers among others), his wry humour, his memories of straitjackets ("Houdini would have just gone 'whoosh', and he'd be out").
ARROGANTLY, PERHAPS, I regret that his life will have gone undocumented, like so many before him in our mental health service. Like the thousands who lie in unmarked graves in the Portrane graveyard by the sea. Sadly George died last Wednesday, but his elegant-if-troubled spirit will live on in the memories of other patients who knew him, and in the affections of those who cared so well for him.
Bernard and I say our goodbyes and walk across the grounds to a long and low unprepossessing grey building. This is the Acute Admissions Unit, the subject of the second film in the series. Unlike the old buildings, I always approach the acute unit with a little trepidation. Here is the coalface of psychiatric care. This is where those of us experiencing a serious or chronic mental health problem will end up.
We knock on the door and security lets us in. Here in the fluorescent-lit yellow corridors is mental health A&E, with its emergency admissions and the constant juggling of beds. Patients are not quite on trolleys yet, but resources and staff are stretched nonetheless. The mental health budget has been on a downward curve, to its present low of just less than seven per cent of our overall health spend. This is not news. Mental anguish remains largely silent in our society. Apart from a few notable exceptions, there is no clamour of strident voices advocating on behalf of those with mental illness. There is still a whiff of stigma; in our culture of success, psychiatric illness smacks too much of failure. Yet the depressions and delusions and the increasing evidence of self-harm speak volumes in the silence.
From a small open window, I can hear one long indeterminate scream. Raw and inarticulate. It is a potent reminder of the depth of anguish that those with mental health problems experience. It makes me think of one young woman who told us about setting fire to herself in the bathroom of the unit. Or another who would cut her skin with blades or burn her breasts with a cigarette.
Much of what we saw and heard while making The Asylum will never make it onto your television screens. There are stories too raw to tell, too disturbing to watch. Attempting to make a series such as this, one is conscious that only the surface is being scratched. A small light in the darkness. Like a muffled scream from a small window.
The Asylum, a four-part series, starts on Monday at 930pm on RTÉ1