An exhibition featuring photographs taken at two former Suffolk mental health hospitals will open this week in Ipswich. Oscar Joachim, who is originally from Sri Lanka, worked for nearly 30 years as a mental health nurse at St Clement's in Foxhall Road and St Audry's Hospital in Melton. The exhibition which will open at The Hive on Norwich Road on Friday is entitled "A Personal Reflection on the County Asylums" and will feature photographs taken by Mr Joachim himself.
Photographs featured in the exhibition will highlight the social history of mental health services both locally and nationally as well as personal images of people and activities who were once part of the fabric of both hospitals. An advert for Oscar Joachim's exhibition featuring a photograph of crosses in the cellar at St Audry's. (Image: Oscar Joachim) Mr Joachim said: "I wanted to commemorate these people who had lived a live in obscurity.
They are very dignified photos; I showed their best side." One of the patients that Mr Joachim looked after at St Clement's was Czech poet Ivan Blatný, a member of the Group 42 artistic group who left Czechoslovakia in 1948 after the communists came to power. Mr Blatný who has a road named after him on the site of the former St Clement's Hospital suffered from a paranoid fear that agents from the Czechoslovakia communist secret police the StB would kidnap him.
According to Mr Joachim the presence of the famous poet who lived in a retirement home in Clacton from 1984 un.
