What went on in the ‘Narcosis Room?’

The  Narcosis Room was always dark, the windows covered and the only light was from a shaded desk lamp that allowed nurses to keep charts on the patient’s depth of ‘sleep’.

At six hourly intervals Narcosis patients were roused in order to be fed, washed and either taken to the lavatory or given bedpans, all of which was accomplished with the help of St Thomas’ Nightingale Nurses because patients were incapable of doing anything for themselves.

Narcosis was emphatically not ‘deep sleep treatment’ as it has been described in order to make it sound a bit less sinister. Narcosis patients weren’t sleeping – they were heavily sedated with a cocktail of drugs that were given in massive doses. This has nothing to do with the current practice of keeping people in drug induced comas, for example in the case of patients with serious head injuries. Narcosis wasn’t of itself intended to treat mental illness. The idea was to render patients incapable of refusing whatever treatment their psychiatrists decided to give them or to stop them just getting up and walking out of the hospital as was their absolute right since none of them had been detained under the Mental Health Act.