Bird's Nest Soup: Locked-up in an Irish Psychiatric Hospital

By Hanna Greally

Hanna Greally spent the best part of the 1940s and 1950s incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands. In Birds Nest Soup she recounts with vivid detail the terrible suffering she endured there. Though mentally well, and accepted as such by the authorities, she was condemned to life in an atmosphere calculated to bring about the steady degradation of the person. But Hanna lived to tell this remarkable and poignant tale of survival

• Language: English
• Publisher: Attic Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781908634313

Hanna Greally

Hanna Greally (also known as Johanna or Joan Greally) was born in Athlone in 1925.

Book preview

Reviews for Bird's Nest Soup

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a sad story, the story of a woman who was left in an asylum after having a minor break-down because first her mother didn't want to have to deal with her and then later her brother didn't want to have to deal with her. Not that when she did leave that she didn't make a life for herself. It's infuriating and terribly sad a story that has the phrase "a few years passed" interspersed with a story of sanity within an insane environ.I'm glad that things have changed but these people, mostly women, were badly injured by assumption and ignorance. This was a sane woman who received Electro-shock therapy because no-one questioned the sanity of that act.