Denbigh Mental Hospital- North Wales Hospital

North Wales Counties Lunatic Asylum in Denbigh opened in 1848 to provide care for Welsh speaking people with mental illnesses.

In reality, up to 1,500 patients, including children with learning disabilities, dementia patients, people with addictions and many with epilepsy lived at the sprawling facility alongside others with acute mental illness.

It would be almost 80 years before the introduction of even rudimentary mental health treatments.

Overcrowding and staff shortages made conditions there "really tough", says Clwyd Wynne, who has written a book on the the history of the asylum.

"They did used to think people were possessed, there's no doubt about that... they hadn't got a clue really what was going on.

"There was no form of treatment for mental illness up until the 1930s, really, so for the first 78 years or so of the hospital, the only treatments were employment and recreation."

He said patients were routinely put to work in the hospital's gardens, laundry or kitchens: "In the laundry alone, there were about 25 to 30 patients working there and only two staff."

There are reports in the the hospital's annual minutes of staff being dismissed for hitting patients or abusing them in some way or another.

His research showed the youngest child in the hospital was a six-year-old with a learning disability.

"You had people that were called idiots and imbeciles who were people with what we now call learning disability," he said.

"Those descriptions are obviously totally unacceptable now, but in the parlance of the time that was how they described people."

He said about 20% of patients had epilepsy at one point: "Now you would never see somebody with epilepsy being admitted to a psychiatric hospital because now they know it's a neurological condition," he said.

He said many World War One soldiers became patients and about 50 remained there by the 1950s: "They had been damaged by what had happened to them in the armed forces... there was no treatment for them then."

Other soldiers became patients after getting syphilis: "They ended up as what we called GPI - general paralysis of the insane... they ended up being in the hospital for many, many years."

When he began working at the hospital, by then renamed North Wales Hospital for Nervous and Mental Disorders, at age 19 in 1965, most treatments involved medication and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was carried out only with anaesthetic - but not always.

"When they first started giving ECT in 1942 the patients were conscious," he said.

"It was quite crude really, it was a bit like when they first started doing amputations, and they'd just give somebody a swig of whiskey and then chop their leg off.

"ECT was a bit like that in that they didn't give them anaesthetic or muscle relaxant and they'd give them the shock and then they would shake violently, sometimes they'd dislocate their joints or break bones, even."

The use of lobotomies was also on the way out: "I was just the at the end of the period where they had been doing prefrontal leucotomy and so I only saw two or three people who have actually had that operation."

In 1961, Enoch Powell, the health secretary, announced the closure of Britain's Victorian mental hospitals but it was not until 1986 that the first asylum was actually closed.

North Wales Hospital shut in 1995.