The Madman’s Hotel podcast on Audible
October 21, 2024
Audible, a provider of spoken word entertainment, has today released a gripping new Audible Original podcast, The Madman’s Hotel, fronted by mental health campaigner and award-winning podcaster, Niall Breslin (Where Is My Mind?), who grew up in the shadows of St Loman’s hospital, and supported by Julie Clarke, whose great grandmother, Julia Leonard spent most of her life inside the its walls.
Beginning with a family’s mission to find the truth about what happened to their great grandmother, The Madman’s Hotel expands to uncover the treatment received by patients within a ‘lunatic asylum’ that led to 1,304 bodies being unaccounted for within its grounds. St Loman’s officially closed its doors in 2013, with the last reported burial occurring in 1970.
Episode one introduces Julia Leonard who was admitted to St Loman’s Hospital (coined in a 1950’s poem penned by a patient, The Madman’s Hotel) by her husband in the late 1890s. Despite her mental state being seemingly well, she spent 20 years imprisoned before her death in 1919. It’s suspected by her great granddaughter, Julie, that the motive behind her incarceration was so her husband could carry on an affair, creating lasting repercussions for the family, with their turbulent and unexpected history revealed over the course of the podcast series.
Julie and Niall embark on a journey to discover what actually happened to St Loman’s graveyard, where exactly Julia Leonard is buried, and even more disturbingly, where the other 1,304 patients are. Together they confront the HSE and engage with other families who have their own stories of relatives who were committed to St Loman’s, spotlighting the enduring stigma attached to mental health for many.
The series culminates in the first apology from the HSE, the government department that manages Ireland’s public health systems and old ‘asylums’ for the mishandling of the graves of former patients, the launch of the series also coincides with legislation seeking to protect the records of survivors of such institutions being brought forward to Ireland’s national parliament this week.
Breslin said of the series “I have dedicated the last four years of my life to uncovering Ireland’s haunting past of coercive confinement in institutions like St. Loman’s. This history has deeply consumed me, revealing a legacy we can no longer ignore. These shadows of the past still echo in our global mental health systems today. What makes it so difficult for society to face this history is that it forces us to hold up a mirror and confront uncomfortable truths. We became so uneasy with others’ pain that we hid it away—quite literally, burying it along with the voices that were silenced. Julia’s heartbreaking story was tragically not unique. For too long, we have stolen people’s freedom and dignity, and my deepest hope for this series is that we can help restore some dignity to those wronged in life by honouring them in death. It has been an absolute privilege to tell this story, and I am profoundly grateful to Julia’s family for trusting me with their truth.”
In its search for answers, The Madman’s Hotel explores Ireland’s dark history with ‘lunatic asylums’, and why so many of its citizens were locked away in these forbidding institutions with no hope of escaping. Niall confronts his own personal struggles growing up in Mullingar in the shadow of St Loman’s Hospital and challenges the common myth of the ‘mad Irish’. Niall throughout the podcast emphasises the need to restore dignity and respect to the families and ancestors of patients in Ireland’s historical psychiatric hospitals.