Introduction

Despite an enduring academic interest in suicide, there has been little systematic research on the role that individual asylums have played in public responses to the phenomenon. This is in spite of the fact that ‘suicidal’ patients formed a central component in lay and professional identification of insanity, in the reasons for committal and subsequent treatment and, though arguably to a lesser degree, the therapeutic milieu of the institutions. Case studies of asylums have revealed the stories of individual patients confined within private licensed homes, charitable lunatic hospitals, and county and borough asylums, and recent work on the history of clinical psychiatry has explored the conceptual relationship between suicidal intention and the classification of insanity. There has been little research on how communities identified suicidal intentions and attempts as demonstrating insanity, and how asylums were used to control and provide surveillance over those who had attempted to take their own lives. Recently, the work of Sarah York and other scholars have begun to address these issues.

While suicide has not been entirely ignored in the historiography of psychiatry, prior to the 1980s there were few detailed studies of suicide in England. Recently, pioneering monographs have formed the basis of a discipline that seeks to remove the subject from the margins of medical and social history. For example, Michael MacDonald and Terrance Murphy have illustrated the secularization of suicide during early modern England.