THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Statistics show that the incidence of insanity in sparsely populated country and moorland districts is above the average.  In reality it is much higher than would appear from figures.  There are many in the country, living the lives of ordinary people in perfect freedom and under no restraint, who, under the official and stricter surveillance of the town, would be locked up at once.  They are looked upon as harmless; everybody knows them, humours their madness, and mades due allowance for their vagaries.  Then there are many more on the borderland, half-cracked and half-baked beings who, if exposed to the strain and excitement of town life, would break down at once.

These mad folk marry and intermarry and propagate children, and so multiply the evil.  Fortunately, by a compensatory law of nature, there is ever a strong tendency in the offspring to revert to normal type; these marriages, moreover, are frequently childless, or, if not childless, productive of weaklings who die early in life.

It was my duty as a poor-law medical officer to certify all those who, by their inability to pay the higher charges of a private asylum, became ipso facto paupers, and if I had certified all those I considered to be insane I should have locked up a big proportion of the country-side.

Bishop/Patients, 1922