Flown the Nest:Escape From an Irish Psychiatric Hospital

Hanna Greally spent the best part of the 1940s and 1950s incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands. In her first book Birds Nest Soup she recounted with vivid detail the terrible suffering she endured there. Hanna’s story continues with an account of her life in Coolamber Manor Rehabilitation Centre in Co. Longford, the place from where she hoped to gain freedom ‘prodigously and for ever’ and to ‘soon be a citizen, vote, earn money, even do crosswords and perhaps become well off’. If Hanna became part of the civil dead in St. Loman’s we can now, for the first time, read alongside her restoration to citizenship and to personal autonomy.