The institutional response to mental disorder in Ireland: censuses of Irish asylums, psychiatric hospitals and units 1844–2014

Before the eighteenth century, there was limited response to the problem of psychiatric illness in Ireland as in many other countries. The asylums of the 1820s and 1830s were no sooner opened than they were overcrowded. A second wave of asylum building commenced in the second half of the nineteenth century continuing up to the early twentieth century. In 1966, the Report of the Commission on Mental Illness noted that the rate of psychiatric beds in Ireland per 1,000 was one of the highest in the world. The report called for a change in the policy of caring for the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals to more community-based settings and in psychiatric units located in general hospital settings, along with a call for more research into mental illness. The result of the latter was the establishment of the first census of psychiatric patients resident in psychiatric hospitals. Thus began fifty years of census reporting and the subsequent establishment of the National Psychiatric Inpatient Reporting System (NPIRS).