Broadmoor is no ordinary hospital. Over 150 years old it’s more secure than most prisons. It’s held many of Britain’s most notorious criminals. Paedophiles, rapists and serial killers whose horrific crimes are judged to be the result of mental illness. This was the world’s first asylum for criminal lunatics. Inside Broadmoor: Criminally Insane, Channel 5 2023
Today a newly built Broadmoor hopes to revive the caring vision of its Victorian founders. But how did it become the secretive and feared institution is was for so long? ibid.
Inside Broadmoor are around 200 men, almost all convicted of shocking crimes. ibid.
1980s Broadmoor valued security and sometimes brutal containment over treatment. ibid.
World in Action deals with the conditions in a mental hospital … Powick Mental Hospital near Worcester built like a hundred others in this country by the Victorians for their lunatics … Some stay for ever … The state of the people who live here are appalling. World in Action: Ward F13, ITV 1968
Powick seems to have become infected with the hopelessness of the Annex inmates. Ibid.
F13: The patients are all female geriatrics … most are incontinent … There are 78 beds only inches apart. ibid.
A parade in Easter bonnet for the patients of a mental hospital [Mapperley in Nottingham]. Some of these people have spent many years here; a few have been here all their lives. But many of them come in just for the day. World in Action: Inside Out, ITV 1969
In the past few weeks Britain’s mental hospital have come in for a hammering. There have been charges of cruelty, carelessness and indifference at some hospitals. In others, the staff are tired and dispirited. ibid.
Some patients who had been inside for forty years were helped back into society. ibid.