Bedlam

If I stick my camera out of the window of the HR office and press the shutter, I get the above photograph of my neighbour; a rather desolate building, now virtually abandoned; the remains of what was in 1763 called the Manchester Lunatic Hospital.

This was home to people who were maniacal, delirious, light-headed, incoherent, rambling, doting, wandering, frantic, raving, stark staring mad, wild-eyed, berserk, delusional, crazy, crazed, non compos mentis, not right, cracked, bereft of reason, unhinged, unsettled, insensate, reasonless, beside oneself, demented, daft, frenzied, frenetic, possessed, deranged, maddened, moonstruck, mad-brained, scatter brained, shatter brained, crackbrained, touched and off their heads.

They were suffering from insanity, lunacy, madness, mania, rabies, furor, mental alienation, aberration, paranoia, schizophrenia, dementia, frenzy, raving, incoherence, wandering, delirium, delusion, hallucination, lycanthropy, brain storm, vertigo, dizziness, fanaticism, infatuation, craze, oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania, kleptodipsomania, hypochondriasis, melancholia, depression, hysteria and amentia.

They were corybantic, dithyrambic, rabid, giddy, vertiginous, wild, haggard, amazed, flighty, distracted, distraught, depressed, agitated, hyped up and bewildered.

Some people were perfectly sane when they went in, and it was the institition that fried their brains and turned them into looneys....

Now where have I come across that idea recently...?