Bird's Nest Soup

Book excerpt: In Birds Nest Soup Hanna Greally recounts with vivid detail the terrible suffering she endured in a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands in the 1940s and 50s. "Mentally well, but unclaimed" sums up her horrendous situation for the best part of twenty years. What she anticipated as a short rest in the `Big House' was repeatedly prolonged as it became clear that after her mother's unexpected death none of her relatives had any intention of applying for her release. She survived this Kafka-esque situation emotionally and physically whole, and when a more enlightened system was introduced, she regained her freedom through a rehabilitation institute in 1962.